This week on “All Things Cage” Laura Kuhn talks about the German cellist, composer, and visual artist Michael Bach and John Cage’s One⁸ (1991), a late number piece written for and with Bach, released in 2004 on Mode Records 141 (Cage 32). Bach is the creator of the BACH Bogen®, a uniquely curved bow he’s been developing since 1990 that makes possible the simultaneous sounding of multiple strings. Before listening to the work, Kuhn reads James Pritchett’s beautiful liner notes that accompany the recording we’ll hear: Mode Records 141 (2004), “John Cage Number Pieces 3.” Pritchett speaks as much about Michael Bach as about John Cage’s work, and in terms that get to the heart of their extraordinary collaboration.

Michael Bach enjoys an international career as a cellist with concerts, recordings, and radio and TV broadcasts. He’s provided significant contributions to the art of playing the cello, including the book Fingerboards & Overtones: Pictures, Basics, and Model for a New Way of Cello Playing. Several contemporary composers, including Dieter Schnebel and John Cage, have created compositions specifically for Bach’s curved bow, and their works are dedicated to him.

Michael Bach is also known under the name Michael Bach Bachtischa. His compositions, which he describes as “free from compositional conventions,” include not only works for cello and curved bow, but also orchestral pieces, works for other solo instruments such as the accordion, organ, clarinet, bagpipe, and works for microtonal piano.

"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!