TAKEHISA KOSUGI

Music Director, was born in Tokyo in 1938. His multi-media music has been presented at international festivals during the past two decades and sound installations have been exhibited in Europe, the United States and Japan. He studied musicology at Tokyo University of Arts where he graduated in 1962. His event pieces of 1960s were introduced by Fluxus to the world. During the 1960s in Japan he cofounded the Group Ongaku, the first Japanese group for free improvisation and event, and the Taj Mahal Travellers, an electro-acoustic/multi media band for free music in various environments. Kosugi came to the U.S. in 1977 in order to compose and perform for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and has been associated with the company since that time. He has been a DAAD artist in Berlin and a guest lecturer at the Hochschule Bildende Kunste in Hamburg. His music has been recorded on the Lovely Music Label.

JOHN CAGE, (1912-1992)

Founding Music Director, studied with Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell, Adolph Weiss, and Arnold Schoenberg. In 1951 he organized a group of musicians and engineers to make music on magnetic tape. In 1952, at Black Mountain College, he presented a theatrical event considered by many to be the first Happening. He was associated with Merce Cunningham from the early 1940's, and was Musical Advisor for Merce Cunningham Dance Company until his death in 1992. Cage and Cunningham were responsible for a number of radical innovations in musical and choreographic composition, such as the use of chance operations and the independence of dance and music.

Cage was the recipient of many awards and honors, beginning in 1949 with a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters for having extended the boundaries of music through his work with percussion orchestra and his invention in 1940 of the prepared piano. Cage was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978, and was inducted into the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 1989. He was named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture in 1982, and received an Honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1986. Cage was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University for the 1988-1989 academic year. He was a laureate of the 1989 Kyoto Prize given by the Inamori Foundation.

In 1987 he wrote, designed, and directed Europeras 1 & 2, with the assistance of Andrew Culver, for the Frankfurt Opera. 101 (1989) was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University. Europeras 3 & 4 was commissioned by the Almeida Music Festival and Modus Vivendi Foundation in 1990. The 1991 Zurich June Festival was devoted to the work of John Cage and James Joyce.

Cage was the author of many books, among them Silence (1961), A Year from Monday (1968), M (1973), Empty Words (1979), and X (1983), all published by Wesleyan University Press. I - VI (the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1988-89) was published by the Harvard University Press in spring 1990. This book includes transcripts of the question and answer periods that followed each lecture, and an audiocassette of Cage reading one of the six lectures. Conversing with Cage, a book length composition of excerpts from interviews, by Richard Kostelanetz, was published in 1988 by Limelight Editions. Cage's music is published by the Henmar Press of C.F. Peters Corporation and has been recorded on many labels.

Since 1958, many of Cage's scores have been exhibited in galleries and museums. A series of fifty-two watercolors, the New River Watercolors, executed by Cage at the Miles C. Horton Center at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC in April/May 1990. In 1991, the Cunningham Dance Foundation produced Cage/Cunningham, a documentary film on the collaboration of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, partly funded by PBS, under the direction of Elliot Caplan. John Cage died in New York City on August 12, 1992.

 Music Committee

DAVID BEHRMAN has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as compositions for performance in concerts. He worked with John Cage, Christian Wolff and David Tudor in the Sixties and Seventies and has had a long association with Merce Cunningham and his company. Among Behrman's works for soloists and small ensembles are Unforeseen Events, My Dear Siegfried, Leapday Night, On the Other Ocean, Interspecies Smalltalk, Homemade Synthesizer Music with Sliding Pitches, Useful Information and Protests 1917—2004. Recordings of his works are published by XI, Lovely Music, Alga Marghen, Classic Masters and Ellipsis Arts; his recent piece Long Throw will be released soon as a video on Roulette TV. Among Behrman's sound and multimedia installations are Cloud Music (1977, a collaboration with Robert Watts and Bob Diamond); Pen Light (2002), and View Finder, most recently exhibited at Stanford University in 2005. He is currently collaborating with Veenfabriek in the Netherlands on music for a (revived) Futurists' Orchestra. He is a member of the faculty at the Avery Graduate Arts Program at Bard College.

JOHN KING is a composer, guitarist, and violist.  He has received commissions from the Kronos Quartet, Red {an orchestra}, Ethel, the Albany Symphony/”Dogs of Desire,” Bang On A Can All-Stars, Mannheim Ballet, New York City Ballet/Diamond Project, Stuttgart Ballet,  Ballets de Monte Carlo, and three commissions from Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Native Green, CRWSPCR, and Fluid Canvas). He was Music Curator at The Kitchen from 1999–2003 and is currently a member of the Music Committee at MCDC. He has written two operas: Herzstuck/heartpiece, based on the text of Heiner Müller, premiered at the 1999 Warsaw Autumn Festival and presented at The Kitchen in 2000;  and la belle captive, based on texts by Alain Robbe-Grillet, premiered at Teatro Colon/CETC in Buenos Aires in 2003, and toured to London’s  ICA (Fronteras Festival) in 2004 and The Kitchen in 2005. In 2009 he received the Alpert Award for music composition. He has two new CD releases of music for string quartet: AllSteel (Tzadik) and Ethel (Cantaloupe). He currently leads his own string quartet, Crucible, which will be recording four new quartets on the New World label in 2009. His recent work includes a new opera, Dice Thrown, based on the Stéphane Mallarmé poem, an excerpt of which was performed in the New York City Opera's 2008 VOX series; and a new evening-length ballet score, Hamlet, for the Stuttgart Ballet, which premiered Oct. 3, 2008.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF was born in l934 in Nice, France, but has lived mostly in the U.S. since 1941. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and briefly composition with John Cage. Though mostly self-taught as composer, the work of John Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, and Earle Brown have been important to him, as well as long associations with Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski. A particular feature of his music is to allow a variety of degrees of freedom at the actual time of its performance. Wolff’s music is published by C.F. Peters, New York and is recorded on many labels. A number of his pieces have been used by Merce Cunningham and MCDC, the first being in 1953. Wolff has been  active as a performer and also as improviser, with Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Lacey, Christian Marclay, Keith Rowe, William Winant, Kui Dong, and Larry Polansky. His writings on music (up to 1998) are collected in Cues: Writings and Conversations, published by MusikTexte, Cologne. He has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and National Institute of Arts and Letters, DAAD Berlin, the Asian Cultural Council, the Fromm Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (the John Cage award for music) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is a member of the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Academically trained as a classicist, Wolff was professor of classics and music at Dartmouth College from 1971 to 1999.                            

Repertory Composers


Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Larry Austin, David Behrman, Pierre Boulez, Paul Bowles, Earle Brown, Gavin Bryars, John Cage, Andrew Culver, Stuart Dempster, Baby Dodds, John Driscoll, Brian Eno, Morton Feldman, Serge Garrant, Jon Gibson, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Alexei Haieff, Josef Matthias Hauer, Pierre Henry, Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Ben Johnston, Norman Lloyd, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Lucier, Martin Kalve, John King, Takehisa Kosugi, Gordon Mumma, Conlon Nancarrow, Bo Nilsson, Pauline Oliveros, Emanuel Dimas di Melo Pimenta, Maxwell Powers, Michael Pugliese, Radiohead, Pat Richter, Erik Satie, Pierre Schaffer, Sigur Ros, Mikel Rouse, Igor Stravinsky, Ivan Tcherpnin, Yasunao Tone, Gregory Tucker, David Tudor, Ben Weber, Chou Wen-Chung, Christian Wolff, La Monte Young, and Walter Zimmermann.