Laura Kuhn talks with Renée Levine Packer, whose lengthy career has included such positions as administrator with Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp and co-director with Jan Williams and Morton Feldman of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo, as well as a director of the Contemporary Music Festival at the California Institute of the Arts. She was a director of the Inter-Arts program at the N.E.A., producer of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s multimedia opera, The Cave, and a dean at the Maryland Institute College of Art. 

Renée has produced two important books in the last decade: in 2010, This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo, published by Oxford University Press, an insider chronicle of an exuberant time of artistic exploration and experimentation populated by now such legendary figures as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Terry Riley, Julius Eastman, David Tudor, and others, and, in 2015, with co-editor Mary Jane Leach, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, published by the University of Rochester Press, a collection of biographical and musical essays. We speak primarily, however, about Renée’s present undertaking – a third book, this one about the late American philanthropist and photographer, Betty Freeman. At the close of tonight’s program we’ll listen to a few movements from Cage’s Freeman Etudes as performed and recorded by Irvine Arditti and dedicated to none other than Betty Freeman.

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!