“The thing to do is to keep the head alert but empty. Things come to pass, arising and disappearing. There can then be no consideration of error. Things are always going wrong.” --John Cage

This week and next “All Things Cage” will focus on a body of works known collectively as “The Ten Thousand Things,” a descriptive title championed by musicologist James Pritchett to denote a grand project initiated by John Cage in 1953 involving the composition of independent pieces for various media, each bearing a number title, each capable of being played alone or together with any number of the others. Tonight’s program will focus on 45’ for a Speaker, which we’ll listen to in its entirety from an archival recording Cage made himself. (If you’ve a copy of Silence handy, read along, as it’s published on pages 146-192!) Next week, we’ll focus on five works from the series – 59 ½” for a String Player (1953), 45’ for a Speaker (1954), 31’ 57.9864” for a Pianist (1954), 26’ 1.1499” for a String Player (1955), and 27’ 10.554” for a Percussionist (1956) – as performed in a chance-determined program lasting 90 minutes given here at Bard College in 2014. The performers were Robert Martin, Adam Tendler, Marka Gustavsson, Garry Kvistad, and myself, Laura Kuhn, beginning with a pre-concert talk by James Pritchett, whose blog on the subject is a must read.

"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!

Photo ©David Gahr.