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This week Kuhn engages in further conversation with Yuval Sharon, founder and co-Artistic Director of The Industry in Los Angeles and currently the Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director of Detroit Opera. The two first spoke on “All Things Cage” on March 2, just prior to both rehearsals for and performances of Cage’s Europeras 3 & 4 (1990), which would take place in less than a week at Detroit’s historic Gem Theatre. On this week’s edition of “All Things Cage,” they were able to speak far more deeply about Sharon’s experiences in directing Cage’s lively collage works for the operatic stage, along with his evolving thoughts about the progression of Cage’s design and thinking across his three works for the operatic stage. Sharon is fast becoming the only opera director to mount all three of Cage’s operas: Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2 (1984-1987) in Los Angeles in 2018 in the Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City, Cage’s Europeras 3 & 4 (1990) in Detroit’s Gem Theatre in 2024, and, with luck, Cage’s Europera 5 (1991), which Sharon hopes to mount in Chicago in 2025, during a week-long residency at the University of Chicago.

"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!