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All Things Cage: Laura Kuhn on Cage's Satie, Composition for Museum (Audio)

Apr 23, 2022
Hosted by Laura Kuhn, Executive Director of the John Cage Trust.

Tonight’s program takes a musical dive into Cage’s lifelong devotion to the French composer Erik Satie by focusing on Kuhn’s exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, conceived in 2012 for Cage’s Centennial Year and entitled CAGE’S SATIE: COMPOSITION FOR MUSEUM. This was a sounded exhibition – the perfect form for remarkably interrelated content. CAGE’S SATIE bears resemblance to a Cage musicircus, wherein disparate musicians and musics are brought together for purposeful, simultaneous, non-obstructive group performance, but with a strong distinction: for whether Cage’s works freely intermingle within an ever-changing soundscape in the museum or are arranged into a fixed simulation of a single visit (as we hear tonight in an extended excerpt from the exhibition catalog CD), the works comprising CAGE’S SATIE are thematically related, and thus sound remarkably well together. This euphonious collage shouldn’t come as a surprise, since all of the works spring from something of a single source, revealing in their commingling very real interrelationships. Cage’s Satie-inspired compositions exhibit characteristics that are somewhat unusual for him: in turn traditional, modal, subtle, graceful, quiet, and monophonic. Some might say oddly subversive, if only for their unabashed beauty.