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 Z?rich 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.