In this very special solo performance, Takehisa Kosugi performs several compositions for multi-dimensional live electronic music—works originally commissioned for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Here, he revises his material for quad sound, using homemade audio generators, readymade sound processors and an improvised lighting system to activate photosensitive electronic circuits. The program includes Cycles (1981), Streams (1991), Op Music (2001), Music for Nearly 90, Part-A (2009) and Octet (2011).

Takehisa Kosugi (b.1938, Tokyo, Japan) is a composer and violinist, and an early member of Fluxus. In 1960, while still a student, he co-founded Group-Ongaku (“music group”), with Yasunao Tone, Mieko Shiomi and others, the first collective improvisation group in Tokyo. And by the early 60s, Fluxus was performing his event pieces in Europe and the U.S. Kosugi stayed in New York from ’65-‘67, creating new works and collaborating with Nam June Paik and other Fluxus members. In 1969 he co-founded the Taj Mahal Travellers, an itinerant octet for mixed-media improvisation that toured England, Europe and the Near East, visiting the Taj Mahal in India in 1971-72. He joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1977 as a composer and performer, toured with John Cage and David Tudor, was appointed its music director in 1995, and worked with the company until 2012.

Kosugi has received grants from The JDR 3rd Fund in 1966 and 1977, a DAAD fellowship grant to reside in Berlin in 1981, and the John Cage Award for Music from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in 1994. He has performed in countless international festivals, and his installations have been presented in exhibitions throughout the world.

Takehisa Kosugi performed in the Lampo series in March 2000, in concert with Jim O’Rourke at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation; organized in cooperation with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Sound