Laura Kuhn breaks from her usual conversational format tonight to simply share a few of her favorite John Cage vocal works performed by one of her favorite vocal groups, Ars Nova. Ars Nova is a Danish vocal ensemble founded in 1979 that is known widely for its exquisite interpretations of the polyphonic choral music of the Renaissance as well as contemporary vocal music. The works we’ll hear this evening are their renditions of Cage’s Living Room Music (1940), Hymns and Variations (1979), and two back to back versions of Cage’s Four2 (1991), conducted by the Hungarian-born Danish choral and opera conductor, Tamás Vetö, all found on the 1998 Mode 71 CD, Cage Edition 18-The Choral Works I.

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!