My impression is that the Beatles’ place is not so much in the world of serious music as it is in the world of revolution. I think that serious musicians would do well to follow their example in this respect. That is, I think our proper business now—whether we’re “popular” or “serious” if we love mankind and the world he inhabits—is revolution.

-- John Cage, from a letter dated Sept. 18, 1967, to Patricia Coffin, senior editor at Look magazine whose article “Art Beat of the ‘60s: The Beatles” appeared in the January 9, 1968 issue, complete with four pop-art color pinups by Richard Avedon.

In this week’s program, Kuhn covers virtually all of the ways that Cage is known to have interacted with The Beatles, both as individual musicians and with their music, delving into his “Notations Project Collection” from the 1960s, the proximity of Cage & Cunningham’s living situation on Bank Street in NYC in the early 1970s with that of John Lennon & Yoko Ono, and the virtually unknown “Carnival of Light,” a 14-minute improvisatory track created by The Beatles in 1967. We listen to two realizations of Cage’s little-known composition entitled The Beatles, 1961-1970 for six pianos and tape (1990), as well as other works by composers who were invited to contribute to Aki Takahashi’s “Beatles Project,” which resulted in a series of beautiful CDs released by Toshiba/EMI/Angel in Japan.

"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!