This week we listen to an excerpt of John Cage reading from his Series re Morris Graves (1973), a lengthy text work first published in 1974 as an introduction to The Drawings of Morris Graves, edited by Ida E. Rubin for The Drawing Society, Inc. Graves (1910-2001) was an extraordinary self-taught artist who was beautifully captured in The Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, published in separate German and English editions to accompany a 2002 exhibition mounted at the Kunsthalle Bremen (Germany) and the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, Washington).

Cage and Graves met in Seattle in the 1930s, when Cage was engaged as a teacher and percussionist at the Cornish School, and the two became fast friends. The material of Series re Morris Graves derives from personal experiences and recollections, as well as conversations with the artist and with some of his friends. Here and there Cage vocalizes brief quotations from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Transformation Symbolism in the Mass by Carl Jung, and the I Ching, which renders this text particularly evocative of its subject. And unlike the other works contained on the same box set of 2 CDs released by Mode Records in 1999 – two works based on the writings of Jasper Johns (What You Say and Art is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else) – Cage’s Series re Morris Graves is not written in mesostic form, but is rather through composed.

"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!