Laura Kuhn is joined this week by Gene Caprioglio, long-time Vice President for New Music and Rights at C.F. Peters, the music publishing concern that has represented John Cage since 1960. Gene shares much about the vagaries of the music publishing business and also much about his own path over the years with regard to contemporary classical music, Cage’s included. Gene has been playing guitar since he was 11 years old, and in his free time he performs as a guitarist and singer with The Bumper Crop Boys and also hosts a jam session at The Wild Goose in Woodside, N.Y. We listen at the end of tonight’s program to pianist Stephen Drury play Cage’s The Seasons, a lyrical work which exists in versions for both orchestra and solo piano that came about in 1947 through a commission from Lincoln Kirstein and the New York Ballet Society.

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!

Photos of The Seasons ©Rudolph Burkhardt