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On this the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Kuhn speaks to John Cage’s aspirational thinking and his incredible prescience, both captured beautifully in two text works we’ll listen to tonight: we open with Cage’s reading of his “Preface” from Lecture on the Weather (1975) and close with his lesser-known adolescent Other People Think (1927), which he delivered representing Los Angeles High School at the Southern California Oratorical Society at the Hollywood Bowl in his native Los Angeles. Both are testimony, if such is needed, to Cage’s prescience and his compassionate sensibilities. We close with a snippet from his Second Construction (1940), composed at the start of World War 2, when Cage was grappling with a heavy heart about what it means to be a composer during deeply troubling times.