“All Things Cage” continues its break from its usual conversational format to allow for an introductory program that examines Cage’s interest in the “circus” as a compositional tool and form, with emphasis on how it appeared in both his very first Musicircus in 1967 at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and in his late-life composition for museum, Rolywholyover   A Circus, composed on a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where it was first seen in 1993, one year after Cage’s death. This is an introductory program in the sense that Kuhn and Julie Lazar, founding curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and collaborator with Cage on Rolywholyover   A Circus , will speak next week on “All Things Cage” about Cage’s influence on their respective lives, both then and now, some 28 years later.

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!