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Laura Kuhn

Kuhn is the John Cage Professor of Performance Arts at Bard College and the executive director and co-founder of the John Cage Trust. In 1986, she began working with John Cage on a variety of large-scale projects, including his six "mesostic" lectures for Harvard University and his first full-scale opera, Europeras 1 & 2, for the Frankfurt Opera, for which she designed costumes and created stage actions. This work became the subject of her 1992 UCLA doctoral dissertation, John Cage's "Europeras 1 & 2": The Musical Means of Revolution.

Upon Cage's death in 1992, along with Merce Cunningham, Anne d'Harnoncourt, and David Vaughan, Kuhn founded the John Cage Trust of New York. She has lectured and conducted performance workshops in venues as diverse as the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Warsaw's Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Brussels' "International Arts Festival." Other projects for the John Cage Trust have included a CD-ROM of sampled piano preparations from Cage's composition, Sonatas & Interludes (1946-48), for use by MIDI keyboard musicians, and the adaptation of Cage's whimsical 1982 radio play, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, to the stage. She has recently collaborated with biographer Ken Silverman on The John Cage Correspondence Collection (2012).

Laura Kuhn

Executive Director
John Cage Trust
Bard College
Campus Road, PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000
kuhn@bard.edu
www.johncage.org

Fields of Knowledge

  • Artistic legacies
  • Pedagogy
  • Performance