Laura Kuhn talks with Adam Tendler, an internationally recognized interpreter of living, modern, and classical composers. Adam is a pioneer of DIY culture in concert music, and at age 23 he performed solo recitals in all 50 United States as part of a grassroots tour he called “America 88x50, which became the title and subject of his memoir, 88x50, a Kirkus Indie Book of the Month and a Lambda Literary Award nominee. Adam is an active presence in contemporary and classical music alike as a soloist, recording artist, speaker, and educator. He is also a leading John Cage interpreter and collaborates with the John Cage Trust and Edition Peters, Cage’s long-time music publisher, in presenting Cage’s work internationally. He recently released the album Robert Palmer: Piano Music on New World Records and published his second book, tidepools.

Kuhn and Tendler speak about Kuhn’s latest book, Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham (John Cage Trust, 2019), all about love and in celebration of Valentine’s Day.

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!