Kay Larson will speak about her new book, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, which addresses the phenomenal importance of Zen Buddhism to John Cage’s life and to the artistic avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s. Zen’s power to transform Cage’s troubled mind—by showing him his own enlightened nature—liberated Cage from an acute personal crisis that threatened everything he most deeply cared about in his life, his music, and his relationship with his life partner, Merce Cunningham. Caught in a society that rejected his art, his politics, and his sexual orientation, Cage was transformed by Zen from an overlooked and marginal musician into the absolute epicenter of the avant-garde.
KSPC DJ/Bands
5 pm Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
9 pm KSPC DJ/Bands
