Alana Pagnutti's "Reception: The Radio-Works of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage" (Smith+Brown, 2016)

Alana Pagnutti, Reception: The Radio-Works of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage
(Smith+Brown, 2016 © Christine Jones)

Pagnutti's work is the first comprehensive look at how Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage embraced and employed radio in some of their most sophisticated and experimental works between 1942 and 1991. These include Rauschenberg's artworks Broadcast (1959) and Oracle (1962-1965) and Cage's compositions Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), Water Walk (1959), and Variations VII (1966). Pagnutti considers how both men were influenced by Marshall McLuhan, and how both used radio to foster and provoke new qualities of experience and to elicit the participation of their audiences. Edited by Victoria Miguel, designed by Christine Jones, and with a beautiful foreword by Angus Carlyle, co-director of Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) at the London College of Communication (UAL). Illustrated, 73 pp.

The official book launch took place at Cafe OTO in London on July 10, 2017, 7-9 pm, with two performances by Arthur Bruce of Cage's Water Walk.  Fun to note that Bruce made use in his arsenal of instruments two of Cage's originals, on loan from the archives of the John Cage Trust: Cage's gong and one of his small, yarn-covered mallets.

Here's a little video excerpt of Bruce's performance (captured by filmmaker George South), where he uses both.

We offered the slightly dented pot lid that Cage used on occasion when touring (see below), but it was declined in favor of an actual cymbal, as called for in the score.

The wonderful photographer Fabio Lugaro was in attendance, and has kindly shared a few of his images below.

Laura Kuhn

Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental?

The Swedish Chef (The Muppets - Popcorn)

Ring any (Water Walk) bells?

A Memory Sidebar: Discovering yet again that some great idea I had was thought of by John Cage some 50 years before, I once asked Merce Cunningham whether he thought Cage wouldn't always be one step ahead of us. He smiled and asked in reply whether I was asking if John Cage would ever be fully assimilated.

He thought about this for a moment and shook his head no. Not in your lifetime, he said.

Laura Kuhn

"Lascia o Raddoppia" (Milan, 1959)

It's been rumored over the years that John Cage was a contestant specializing in mushroom identification on "Lascia o Raddoppia" ("Double or Nothing"), Italy's famous quiz show hosted by Mike Bongiorno. Cage was in Milan in the late 1950s as a guest of the composer Luciano Berio, who was then working at the Studio di Fonologia, RAI's experimental studio for audio research. Sylvano Bussotti, Umberto Eco, Bruno Maderna, Roberto Leydi, Marino Zuccheri, Peggy Guggenheim, and Berio's wife, Cathy Berberian, were all close to Cage during this period. According to unconfirmed rumors, due to the tight relation of some of these individuals to RAI, Cage not only garnered a much-coveted spot on the game show as a contestant, but he may have been provided with at least some of the answers to the questions about mushrooms he would be asked en route to winning the final 5 million Lire prize.

(Photo caption: "John Cage is mostly known for his love of 'concrete' music rather than mycology. Such music makes a symphony out of bells or the sound of a train passing by. For the 'daily noises' program, John Cage constructed an orchestra consisting of a piano, two radios, a blender, a watering can, a whistle, a gong, and a kettle.")

During his five appearances on the show, Cage entertained the audience with his unusual compositions. The audience was constantly reminded that he was a composer from Stony Point, New York, and Bongiorno often made fun of his strange musical efforts. No footage has survived, although various people over the years have claimed to have seen it.

There apparently is at least an audio tape in existence, however, since the final episode's dialogue between Cage and Bongiorno has been transcribed and published. This transcription, which appeared for the first time in the October 1975 issue of Gong, an Italian music magazine of the 1970s, includes both the mushroom Q & A as well as a funny closing exchange between game show host and contestant wherein Cage is encouraged to spend more time in Italy without his music.

According to Carlo Bertocci, its contributor (whose ironic title is "The Prophet and the Puppetmaster," referring to Cage and Bongiorno, respectively), the tape was handed to him a couple of years earlier by his friend, Mario Leone. Bertocci's transcription was later reprinted in a series of essays about Cage in an Italian publication entitled "John Cage. Dopo di me il silenzio" (Emme Edizioni, December 1978), and still later in "Sonora's John Cage" (Materiali Sonori, 1993), an Italian/English collection of articles celebrating the composer that was published shortly after his death. It was most recently republished in a new collection of essays simply titled "John Cage" (Edizioni Mudima, 2009).

Click here for an English translation of this dialogue, which features the final questions about mushrooms posed to Cage that led to his winning the final 5 million Lire prize. This prize, incidentally, which amounted to roughly $8,000, was used to purchase a piano for Cage's Stony Point home as well as a Volkswagen bus for the fledgling Merce Cunningham Dance Company's use while touring the United States.

Very few photos of Cage's appearances on "Lascia o Raddoppia" have survived, including this screenshot, likely captured from the still-missing video footage:

But several new images are now available, thanks to Turin's newspaper, La Stampa, which published brief, intermittent reports about the show (with photographic illustrations) and whose archives have recently become available online.

Like this one, a slightly different shot than the one above of Cage and Bongiorno perusing Cage's Water Walk set up (from La Stampa, February 6, 1959, Issue No. 32, page 6).

And this one of Cage at the microphone, with headphones on his ears (from La Stampa, Friday, February 13, 1959, No. 38, page 4):

And yet another, this one a close-up of Cage in the sound booth (from La Stampa, Friday, February 13, 1959, No. 38, page 6).

Lastly, a little-known photo of John Cage and Peggy Guggenheim, taken in Venice (from La Stampa, Thursday, February 19, 1959, No. 43, page 6).

La Stampa's newly-available archives provide access to not only these little-known images, but to concrete evidence of Cage's appearances on "Lascia o Raddoppia": the first taking place on Thursday, January 29, 1959, continuing weekly on Thursday nights throughout February, with the final episode taking place on Thursday, February 26, 1959. Click here for English translations of chronologically-ordered excerpts from the most significant of the La Stampa articles.

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"Lascia o Raddioppia" (Milan, 1959) is the first of what I hope will be many "guest" blogs, this one the work of our remarkable Italian Cage foreign correspondent, Stefano Pocci. Thank you, Stefano, for your persistent research and a beautiful piece, and do forgive any transgressions that have occurred in the adaptation of your work for Kuhn's Blog.

Laura Kuhn

Something About Cage's Time

I alluded late last year, on the heels of our John Cage Symposium at Bard College, to an interesting talk given at one of the sessions by Bard's resident biologist and (more than) amateur watchsmith, Dwane Decker, entitled "Replicable Chance: Time as Structure in Aleatory Composition" (11/1/09, 10 a.m., Olin Hall).

The audience was modest, as was the case for virtually all of the Symposium sessions, but the response in this case was particularly enthusiastic. Of course, any lecture on the subject of "Cage and Time" piques the interest of any Cage enthusiast, and even the laziest among us showed up for Decker's early morning talk. But no one could have anticipated Decker's unique vantage point, which was to explore Cage's use of (and interest in) time through an in-depth look at his personal timepieces.

Decker's presentation has stayed with me for months -- perhaps as much for its intimacy as its originality -- and I'm very happy to say that he's agreed to let us link to a transcript of his complete presentation here. Well, not quite complete. What's *not* included here is his really elucidating closing demonstration: a screening of Cage's performance of Water Walk (courtesy of the ubiquitous 1960 episode of "I've Got a Secret"), while at the same time manipulating, as Cage may well have done, the two synchronized second hands of Cage's own A.R. and J.E. Meylan stopwatch, which we were able to witness via microscope projections to screen. The audience was, to say the least, enthralled.

In addition to Cage's watches -- both his A.R. and J.E. Meylan Swiss stopwatch and his workaday Accutron Spaceview from America's own Bulova Watch Company, both of which are covered in great detail in Decker's talk -- the John Cage Trust is home to two other well-known Cage timepieces:

The doubled-faced, dual-action clock he used whenever engaged in competitive chess matches at home, and

his doubles-as-a-doorstop, metal-encased Kodak Timer, reportedly used in several performances of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.

The Kodak Timer, of course, has been memorialized in Jack Mitchell's well known and quite marvelous photograph of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and "clock" (c.1968).


But while I'm on the subject of the John Cage at Bard College Symposium, let me share a slide show of some 90-odd images taken across the three days by the amazing photographer Donald Dietz.

The presenters, performers, and all-around essential participants, many of whom you'll recognize, were Katherine Adamov, James Bagwell, Bob Bielecki, David Bloom, Jo Brand, Frank Corliss, Dwane Decker, Kyle Gann, Kayo Iwama, Michael Ives, Rebeccah Johnson, Erica Kiesewetter, Laura Kuhn, Peter Laki, Tom Mark, Emy Martin, Julie Martin, Robert Martin, Blair McMillen, Rufus Muller, NEXUS (Bob Becker, Bill Cahn, Russell Hartenberger, Garry Kvistad), John Pruitt, Joan Retallack, Marina Rosenfeld, Sandra Skurvida, Jenni Sorkin, Richard Teitelbaum, and Jason Treuting. And, of course, the many, many incredible students from the Bard College Conservatory, Music Program, Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and Center for Curatorial Studies. And thank you to Brian Nozny for his beautiful arrangement of Cage's Chess Pieces, reprised here, and Leon Botstein for the sumptuous opening day lunch.

Laura Kuhn