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Opening Night Celebration

What is (a) Happening

What is (a) Happening?: Black Mountain College By Austin T. Richey, Ph. D. Digital Media Manager and Storyteller, Detroit Opera Black Mountain College, c. 1940s. Black Mountain Summer School, North Carolina. John Cage came to Black Mountain College in April 1948, during a brief stopover in Asheville, North Carolina. He, along with his partner and...

Detroit Opera: A History of Reinvention, Ambition, and Belonging

Detroit Opera: A History of Reinvention, Ambition, and Belonging By Austin T. Richey, Ph. D. Digital Media Manager and Storyteller, Detroit Opera Detroit Opera’s history is larger than a building, and larger than a single founder’s extraordinary vision. It is the story of how an educational program became a nationally significant opera company; how a...

Cage vs. Chaos

Cage vs. Chaos: Is John Cage Really About Disorder? Is the composer of silence really an apostle of randomness — or something far more disciplined? By Austin T. Richey, Ph. D. Digital Media Manager and Storyteller, Detroit Opera John Cage at Britain’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 1989. James Fraser/Rex Features.   John Cage is...

A Timeline of the Detroit Opera House

A Timeline of the Detroit Opera House By Austin T. Richey, Ph. D. Digital Media Manager and Storyteller, Detroit Opera 1896 The Detroit Opera House c. 1896. Burton Historical Collection. Detroit’s first public motion picture screening takes place at the earlier Detroit Opera House on Campus Martius — a fitting prelude to the long entertainment...

Bugs Bunny at the Symphony Program

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What Is an Apartment House of Sound?

What Is an Apartment House of Sound? John Cage’s America as Overlapping Rooms What does it mean to hear a nation not as a single story, but as an architecture of coexistence? By Austin T. Richey, Ph. D. Digital Media Manager and Storyteller, Detroit Opera John Cage in his apartment, photo by Roberto Masotti (1979)...

PROGRAM: Paul Taylor Dance Company

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John Cage’s Detroit: Sounds of Silence

John Cage’s Detroit: Sounds of Silence By Austin T. Richey, Ph. D. Digital Media Manager and Storyteller, Detroit Opera The 1950s saw Cage toying with the very foundational ideas of composition. After receiving a copy of the I-Ching—a classic Chinese divination tool—from a pupil, Cage began employing the text to elicit chance procedures in his...

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John Cage’s Detroit: Early Years

John Cage’s Detroit: Early Years By Austin T. Richey, Ph. D. Digital Media Manager and Storyteller, Detroit Opera John Cage during his 1966 concert at the opening of the National Arts Foundation in Washington, D.C. Image: Rowland Scherman / Getty Images. “The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is...