This week Laura Kuhn talks with Rob Haskins, an American musicologist, critic, performer, and old friend who holds degrees in musicology and harpsichord performance from the University of Rochester Eastman School of Music. In 2004 he joined the University of New Hampshire, where he is currently Professor of Music. In 2012 he acted as musical director and performer for a new production of Cage’s Song Books at the Holland Festival with the new-music group Alarm Will Sound. He’s also written extensively about John Cage, including the book John Cage (Reaktion, 2012) and John Cage and Recorded Sound: A Discographical Essay, published by the Music Library Association, Vol. 67, Number 2, in December 2010, and available, along with several other of his writings, at Project MUSE online. Haskins also authored Classical Listening: Two Decades of Reviews from the “American Record Guide” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). This evening we focus on his Anarchic Societies of Sounds: The Number Pieces of John Cage, a reworking of his doctoral dissertation published in 2009 by VDM Verlag; this is the first-ever book devoted to the subject of Cage’s last series of works, the so-called “number pieces,” distinguished by their number titles and making use of Cage’s late-life, groundbreaking time-bracket notation.

"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!