Here we are at Part 2 of my conversation with Jade Dellinger, director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern State College (formerly Edison State College). There’s much to talk about with Jade, and Part 1, which aired last Saturday night, focused on his personal history as well as his rather unusual installation of Cage’s audience participatory 33 1/3 in Tampa in 2012 as part of a larger exhibition entitled “Things Not Seen Before: A Tribute to John Cage.” Tonight, we focus on this larger exhibition, and our conversation extends to include his unusual findings as a collector, many of which found their way into this exhibition. Jade also speaks about his upcoming exhibition, “Don’t Blame It on Zen: John Cage & Friends,” which will be seen at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center in Asheville, North Carolina, this fall for several months, happily in tandem for a weekend with the Black Mountan College + Art Center’s 12th Annual ReViewing Black Mountain College International Conference, which will take place November 12-14.

At the end of tonight’s program, we’ll listen to something that fits nicely into the category of “Things Not Heard Before” – a little-known pre-concert talk given by the late American composer Richard Teitelbaum at our “John Cage at Bard College” Symposium in 2009. Teitelbaum died in 2020, and his co-founder of the important live acoustic/electronic improvisation group formed in 1966 in Rome known as Musica Elettronic Viva (or M.E.V.) Frederic Rzewski died this past week. I’ve been flooded with memories of them both and their important work.

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!