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Laura Kuhn talks this week with UK composer and author Martin Iddon about three of his books to date – New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (2013), John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance (2013), and John Cage and Peter Yates: Correspondence on Music Criticism and Aesthetics (2020), all published by Cambridge University Press and all providing profound insight into John Cage’s ascendance as a composer through his relationships with a handful of extraordinary friends. Indeed, by his late ‘30s, Cage is writing with ease and fluency to his intellectual peers, evidenced first by Cambridge University Press’s 1991 publication of the Cage-Boulez Correspondence edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Add Iddon’s compilations of writings between Cage and Tudor and between Cage and Yates, what we see is that in the case of Boulez and Tudor, what is covered is mostly technical matters of composition; with Yates, mostly matters of aesthetics, music history, and style.  

This week’s program closes with an excerpt of one of Iddon’s own compositions, Hesperides (2020), for which he provides a word on how best to listen to the recording:

“This music is meant to be (very) quiet and listening to it at the right volume makes a significant difference. Try to set your volume so that the loudest moments are full and present, but not actually loud. This might make the quietest moments barely audible, on the edge of what you can hear, which is about right. If you’re listening somewhere where there’s a bit of noise, some of the louder sounds around you may even be a bit louder than the quietest sounds on the recording; that’s as it should be.”

"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!