Tonight’s program features a wonderful performance by John Cage and Yvar Mikhashoff of Cage’s Empty Words (1973-1974) with excerpts from Music for Piano, a series begun some 40 years earlier, as well as Cage performing One⁷ (1990), both produced and captured by Mode Records for its Mode Records 200 CD, John Cage Edition 41, released in 2009. This performance took place in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1991, coinciding with the premiere performance of Cage’s Europera 5 at the North American New Music Festival, in which Mikhashoff also performed. Mikhashoff instigated Cage’s composition of Europera 5, and he was among Cage’s favorite musicians; his death at the lamentably young age of 52 was mourned by virtually everyone who had the privilege to work with him.

"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!