Tonight’s program for “All Things Cage” is the first of two that will focus on Cage’s time at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, which formally began with the academic year 1960-1961 when Cage served as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies. We’ll listen to Cage’s little-known Address to the Gentlemen of the Wesleyan Glee Club, as read by Laura Kuhn, our program’s host, a delightfully whimsical piece composed and presented in 1960. At the end of Kuhn’s reading, we’ll continue this program’s spirit of storytelling with an extended excerpt from Cage’s Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, as performed by Cage and his formidable collaborator, David Tudor, recorded in the 1950s and released in a two-CD box set by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 1992.

"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!