This evening we’ll listen to John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow engage in a public conversation that took place on Sunday, Aug. 20, 1989, within the proceedings of the 1989 Telluride Institute known as “Composer-to-Composer.” Los Angeles music critic Alan Rich, who worked closely with Betty Freeman on her Beverly Hills’ Musicales throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, at which both John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow gave presentations (1982 and 1984, respectively), knew the work of both men well and thus moderated their programs.

For the Telluride Institute presentation, some five years later, our moderator is Charles Amirkhanian, and the conversation between the two men is further enlivened by questions from the audience. Capturing live conversations on tape is always tricky, and this one was no exception. If anyone in our listening audience would like a transcript of this program to facilitate comprehension (a transcript that will be complete, by the way, even though we don’t have time for a complete audio playback of the conversation), please email your request to lkuhn@johncage.org.

"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!

Pictured left :Nancarrow and Cage at Telluride ©John Fago. Pictured right: ©John Cage Trust.