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All Things Cage: Laura Kuhn on John Cage, One8 and 108 (1991) (Audio)

Sep 23, 2023
Hosted by Laura Kuhn, Executive Director of the John Cage Trust.

This week’s program is a follow-up to one that aired earlier this month – September 2, to be exact – wherein Kuhn presented Michael Bach’s performance of John Cage’s One8 for solo cello (1991), as captured on the beautiful premiere recording released by Mode Records in 2004. This week we’ll hear John Cage’s One8 as performed by cellist Karen Krummel simultaneously with his orchestral 108 (also 1991), two works composed and designed to be performed together and heard in what is in effect a cello concerto with the Chance Philharmonic and released on the OgreOgress label in 2010; the recording and mastering were the work of Glenn Freeman, founder of OgreOgress Productions as well as percussionist in this recording, with artwork by Ladislav Hanka, liner notes by George Adams, and design by Heidi Stukkie. Kuhn also includes lengthy quoted materials about Cage’s “number pieces” as well as Cage’s radical ideas about orchestral performance, drawn from an excellent article by Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed entitled “Cage and Counting: The Number Pieces,” included in the metal box catalog for Cage’s composition for museum, Rolywholyover: A Circus (NY: Rizzoli, 1993).