This week’s program for “All Things Cage” marks Kuhn’s brink of retirement as Director of the John Cage Trust as well as her return to new programming for WGXC 90.7, not weekly, as before, but four times a year. This quarter’s program explores a little-known CD from 2012 put out by the Electronic Music Foundation, produced by William Blakeney and EMF founding-director, Joel Chadabe. The recording features a host of players, including Cage himself, who collectively perform two compositions: John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD (1967-69), scored for 1-7 amplified harpsichords synchronized by computer with tapes distributed across 1-51 monaural machines, and John Cage’s Birdcage (1972), scored for 12 pre-recorded tapes to be distributed by a single performer in a space in which people are free to move and birds to fly. The two works were presented together in a program given on June 11, 2008, at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto.

"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!