You can hear here an eleven-minute interview that Steve Paulson did with me for “The Best of Our Knowledge” about Cage’s 4’33”. Â I couldn’t listen to all of it, my own voice on the radio makes me squirm. I’m in love with my own words – when I see them in print, not when I’m speaking them. I wish I spoke more slowly and evenly and with more gravitas, though my style does seem to be entertaining in the classroom. It didn’t really occur to me that I had written books about two composers both born in the same year, 1912, until the joint centennial rolled around. Now I’m much in demand for interviews and conferences, always on the same two subjects, about which I have decreasingly little to say. Meanwhile, I’m hip-deep in all the Ives music that relates to the Concord Sonata, and would love to talk about that instead. When Cage died I wrote three Village Voice articles about him in quick succession. For the next few months I was deluged by organizations trying to get me to come to their Cage concerts, since I was obviously a Cage fanatic; my editor, on the other hand, was saying, “That’s enough about Cage for awhile, maybe you should find something else to write about,” and I fully agreed. How quickly we get pigeonholed!, and people assume that what we’ve already done is all we want to continue doing. Luckily, I’ve also been asked to give keynote addresses at Partch and Earle Brown conferences in the coming months, both at Northeastern University, so that will give my brain a chance to exercise on a couple of new tracks. However, since I do love getting free airfare to travel to exotic places, it occurred to me to quickly churn out books on Babbitt, Bernstein, and Lou Harrison, to take advantage of the next round of centennials coming up.