The international recording, touring, and guitar virtuoso Aaron Larget-Caplan is back for the third time, having more questions for our host. Larget-Caplan was Laura Kuhn’s second guest on All Things Cage on January 9, 2021, and soon after he was asking for an ex post facto quid pro quo: doing another program together with their roles reversed. With Larget-Caplan at the helm, their resulting conversation was almost entirely about Kuhn and her 30+ year journey with Cage, but Kuhn closed the program with a lengthy excerpt by Cage from his first public performance of his Overpopulation and Art in 1992. For tonight’s program, Aaron again had his list of questions in hand, but we made it through only the first two. Mostly we talked about why we listen to music, what we’re really asking for from the choices we make, and how musicians tend more often to be active listeners.

All Things Cage is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!