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Laura Kuhn writes, “Tonight’s program continues with Part III, the conclusion of a “Birthday Celebration Broadcast”/Opera Mix created with and for the “Great John Cage,” which has been airing for the past two weeks on “All Things Cage.” This program was created in 1987, when Cage was in the throes of his work on Europeras 1 & 2 for the Frankfurt Oper on the occasion of the institution of its new director/conductor, Gary Bertini. The program runs three hours in its entirety, mostly taken up by the working process required to mix (and remix) opera snippets by turntable engineers working with recordings brought together in the studios of WKCR 89.9-FM, the radio station at Columbia University. The program is introduced by Sam Seliger, librarian/archivist for WKCR, and was originally broadcast live on WKCR in August of 1987. Cage used much of the occasion of this live broadcast to work with a small team of audio engineers, Bob Bielecki at the helm, which would ultimately constitute “Truckera,” a 3-minute tape of 101 layered fragments of European operas heard from time to time passing through the percussion section of the Europeras 1 & 2 orchestra. The host of the program is Brooke Wentz.

Europeras 1 & 2 occupied much of Cage’s time in the 1985-1987 window, and it was also the work that I spent the most of my own time on, having begun work with Cage in New York in 1985. Cage had assumed a Wagnerian role with this work – his first full-scale opera – handling virtually every aspect of its composition and creation, with help from Andrew Culver. The program is airing here at WGXC in three parts, each running roughly one hour: Part I aired on Dec. 30, Part II aired on Jan. 6, and the third and final Part III is airing tonight, Jan. 13.

Cage interspersed various readings and recorded performances throughout the live program being produced at WKCR: in Part I, he read synopses of the program notes that he’d created for distribution to Europeras 1 & 2 audiences –chance-determined lines from extant opera programs that in their new configurations make no usual sense; in Part II, we heard a newly recorded performance of his Hymnkus (1986), performed by Matthew Kocmieroski and the New Performance Group; tonight, in Part III, we intermittently hear the broadcast tape (slightly truncated in its culmination), of his newly finished “Essay” (1987), short for Henry David Thoreau’s Writings through the Essay: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, which he’d offered up for playback while the remixing process was underway. Cage describes this work in some detail at the close of last week’s program, so tonight’s listeners, if they missed it, might want to have a listen. The remainder of the program takes us through the final mixing (and remixing) process of the “Truckera” tracks, a component of Europeras 1 & 2 comprising 101 opera snippets that would be heard within the percussion section of the work’s small orchestra, which Cage likens to a truck passing by.

This has been a long, arduous, and fascinating process to witness, and I applaud listeners who have made it to the end. Enjoy!

"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!