Inspired by last week’s program, a conversation with the accomplished pianist and conductor, Stephen Drury, Kuhn opts to devote this week’s program to two other Cage works produced by Drury for a Mode Records release in 2000 – Etcetera (1973) and Etcetera 2/4 Orchestras (1985), both for orchestra enhanced by recorded sounds and one with the addition of inverted cardboard boxes turned musical instruments to augment the orchestral sounds. Drury is a long-time teacher at the England Conservatory of Music where he directs the amazing Callithumpian Consort. Both the New England Conservatory Symphony Orchestra and the Callithumpian Consort are featured on this recording – Mode Records 86, Cage Edition 21, “Orchestral Works 2,” featuring multiple conductors: Drury himself, Tamara Brooks, Charles Peltz, Marsha Hassett, and Laurie K. Redmer. This first recording of these two major orchestral works by John Cage was recorded under the composer’s supervision at the New England Conservatory’s John Cage Festival in 1991.

"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!

Pictured above: John Cage, 1970. ©James Klosty