"Emily Martin, familiarly known as Emy, is my right and sometimes left arm here at the John Cage Trust and for well over a decade. Emy and I created this program back in October 2020 as a way of testing the technology and our manner of using it. As it turned out, our conversation quickly led us into the subject of the inception and history of the John Cage Trust, a bit about the scope and scale of our archives, and something about our past and present work. This might well serve as a kind of primer program on the John Cage Trust for uninitiated but interested listeners at All Things Cage." - Laura Kuhn

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!