This week’s program brings back Paul B. Franklin, an independent scholar and a leading expert on Marcel Duchamp based in Paris and Céret who graced us with his presence last week on “All Things Cage.” As we learned, from 2000 to 2016, Paul was the editor in chief of the annual, bi-lingual scholarly journal Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, one of the most highly regarded publications devoted to the artist and his work; Vol. 6 from the series is devoted to Duchamp and Cage, and an image of it graces this week’s show page. Paul also worked with Duchamp’s heirs for many years, managing the artist’s estate. I’ve brought Paul back simply because there was so much more to talk about relative to our respective lives that might be of interest to others – the career paths we’ve taken in particular, but really much more, having to do with our respective families and the relationships we’ve forged out of the colorful lives we’ve had the good fortune to live. And, as luck would have it, Paul felt the same. This week’s program is far more personal than the last, very much about creating a life, and with it a career, and thus may be of particular interest to young artists just starting out, or those with lots of experience who are contemplating a change. And, as we’re reprising Paul’s visit, we’ll also be reprising Margaret Leng Tan’s beautiful recording of Cage’s 1947 Music for Marcel Duchamp, heard courtesy of Mode Records, from MODE 106, John Cage Volume 25, The Piano Works 4, dating from 2002.

"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!