About the John Cage Trust

Mission & Overview

The John Cage Trust furthers the legacy of late American composer John Cage by gathering together, organizing, preserving, and disseminating his work. 

John Cage (1912–1992) is routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature. Cage’s life and work continue to expand how we might experience and think about music, art, poetry, performance, philosophy, and the ways we live our lives. 

The John Cage Trust is guided at every step not so much by what Cage has done but, rather, by what Cage is doing now—through the work of others. The John Cage Trust ensures that Cage’s voice remains vibrant, and toward that presents, organizes, and collaborates on programs, performances, exhibitions, and scholarship. 

Myriad histories, essays, and analyses of Cage’s life, work, and influences have been written. Cage wrote “An Autobiographical Statement” in 1990 that you can read here.

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Brief History & Program Highlights

The John Cage Trust was established as a not-for-profit institution in 1993. Its founding trustees were Merce Cunningham, Artistic Director of the Cunningham Dance Company, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director of the Philadelphia Museum, and David Vaughan, Archivist of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, all long-time Cage friends and associates. Laura Kuhn, who from 1986 to 1992 worked directly with John Cage, is both a founding trustee and the John Cage Trust’s first Executive Director. In 2008, d’Harnoncourt was replaced by Margarete Roeder, long-time gallerist to both Cage and Cunningham; in 2009, Cunningham was replaced by Melissa Harris, editor-in-chief of Aperture; and in 2019, Vaughan was replaced by Trevor Carlson, former (and last) Director of the Cunningham Dance Foundation. In 2013, the John Cage Trust officially joined the ranks of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, as a “supporting organization,” at which time Robert Martin, Director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, joined the board. Effective June 2019, Martin officially retired, and new Special Trustees from Bard College were thereafter named: Frank Corliss and Tan Dun, both representatives of Bard’s Conservatory of Music. In 2020 Margarete Roeder stepped down from Board service, and Ray Kass, artist and long-time collaborator with John Cage, joined the Board. In 2022 Larry Larson, longtime web developer for the John Cage Trust and various other renowned artists, a part of Merce Cunningham’s extended family, and trained musician as well, joined the board.

The John Cage Trust functions as both a business concern and an archive and repository for Cage’s work. In the latter capacity, it maintains sizable collections of music, text, and visual art manuscripts. It also houses extensive audio, video, and print libraries, which are continually expanding, as well as a substantial permanent collection of visual art works by John Cage, which are made available for exhibitions worldwide. The Trust is open year-round by appointment to visitors to assist ongoing work involving, in diverse ways, the legacy of John Cage. Founding Executive Director Laura Kuhn traveled extensively, lecturing on topics relating to Cage’s life and work and conducting performance workshops. In 1998, simultaneous with a performance of the Cage/Cunningham collaboration, Ocean, and the premiere installation of Cage’s Roaratorio at the Queens Festival in Belfast, she was called upon to cook a post-performance macrobiotic meal for some 80 people in its theater cafe! That same year, she delivered a series of lectures at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where Cage’s work was not well known.

The John Cage Trust also works closely with others in the promotion and placement of Cage’s work. In 1993, after an extensive inventory was made and a catalog prepared, the John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, numbering some 28,000 pages, was acquired by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The John Cage Trust also works closely with Northwestern University’s Music Library, which houses the John Cage Correspondence Collection (as well as the Notations Project, scores, scrapbooks, and ephemera). The John Cage Trust works with Cage’s long-time publisher, C.F. Peters, now merged with Wise Music Group, in promoting new performances and recordings, as well as providing licensing and rights. It additionally long worked closely with the Margarete Roeder Gallery in New York City and still currently works with Crown Point Press in San Francisco in the placement of Cage’s visual art works in museums and private collections around the world. And, for nearly two decades, it worked intimately with the Cunningham Dance Foundation to assist its continued use of live music for dance, a trademark tradition initiated by Cage and Cunningham in 1953 with the formation of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Upon Cunningham’s death in 2009, Kuhn was appointed one of four founding board members of the Merce Cunningham Trust.

In 1999, the organization embarked on a number of progressive, proactive projects designed to contribute to the continuing relevance of Cage’s work. A particularly interesting example, from 2002, involved the sampling of prepared piano sounds that were subsequently released by Big Fish Audio in a format suitable for MIDI systems. This project, initiated with Cage’s landmark composition for the instrument, Sonatas & Interludes (1946–48), extended the life of both the prepared piano itself and Cage’s significant body of works written for the instrument. In 2000, the John Cage Trust co-produced a theatrical realization of Cage’s whimsical 1982 radio play, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, utilizing a sound score constructed from materials in its archives by New York composer Mikel Rouse. This work, directed by Kuhn, was seen in venues around the world, including Edinburgh, Berlin, Dublin, Perth, and California. In 2007, the John Cage Trust also produced a theatrical realization, again under Kuhn’s direction, of Cage’s Lecture on the Weather, seen live at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, and, in 2008, at the Chelsea Art Museum, co-sponsored by the Electronic Music Foundation. In 2009 an installation version of the Bard College performance was also featured in The Anarchy of Silence, a significant art exhibition at the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, curated by Julia Robinson.

As a natural by-product of its on-going archival restoration endeavors, involving the digital transfer of works in various media, the first decade of the new millennium saw a number of co-produced audio releases by the John Cage Trust with Mode Recordsof Cage’s own text readings. The first, John Cage Performs Cage: The Text Pieces I (The Artist Pieces), features a lengthy, little-known work, Series re Morris Graves, in which Cage recounts in both words and song his formative experiences while living in Seattle, Washington. Two other works are included: Art is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else and What You Say, both utilizing Cage’s innovative “mesostic” poetry form and based on the words of his long-time friend and associate, Jasper Johns. The John Cage Trust also works closely with publishers who have a long-standing commitment to Cage publishers, such as Wesleyan University Press, who in the first years of the new millennium released Cage’s Anarchy, as well as the paperback edition of his important six-part lecture as holder of the Charles E. Norton Chair in Poetry at Harvard University, I-VI. In 2010, the John Cage Trust began a three-year annual publication of the John Cage Book of Days, an intimate daily calendar filled with important Cage dates and pithy quotations, and in 2015 we saw the first-ever publication of all eight parts of Cage’s Diary: How to Improve the World (You’ll Only Make Matters Worse) by Siglio Press (a theatrical performance of the work, featuring 24 readers, each assigned a different color and font from the text, and conceived by Jeffrey Lependorf took place at Basilica Hudson also took place that year); in 2019 a paperback edition was published that also includes facsimiles of Cage’s incomplete Part IX, reproduced from manuscripts held in the archives of the John Cage Trust. In 2016, after years of work, Wesleyan University Press published The Selected Letters of John Cage, edited by Laura Kuhn.

In 2000, the John Cage Trust initiated work with Munich’s Schirmer Mosel Verlag on the “John Cage Catalogue Raisonné,” the first volume of which, John Cage Ryoanji, became available in time for John Cage’s centennial year of 2012. That same year www.johncage.org was launched, the mammoth undertaking of Larson Associates built on the work of Andre Chaudron, whose www.johncage.info had served Cage enthusiasts for well over a decade. In addition to a fully integrated and searchable database of critical aspects of the holdings of the John Cage Trust, the site features many additional components. The site is now in the process of being redesigned to accommodate a number of other features and be more easily modified going forward. In 2017, John Cage’s Personal Library was fully catalogued and annotated, and is now readily available on the site.

In 2007, the John Cage Trust went into residential placement at Bard College, where Kuhn was appointed the first John Cage Professor of Performance Arts. That inaugural year, two commemorative concerts were given: the afore-mentioned Lecture on the Weather, with an all-star cast that included Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, John Ashbery, John Ralston Saul, Leon Botstein, and others, and “Nexus Live!”, a full evening of percussion works given by the celebrated ensemble. In 2009, the first John Cage Trust-sponsored symposium was given with “John Cage at Bard College,” with participation from Cage enthusiasts resident at Bard College. In 2013, the John Cage Trust became a permanent member of the Bard community, and in 2018 the organization moved into a new building on campus, known familiarly as The Wilson House, significantly expanding its on-site archives, research, and working space.

The year 2019 marked the Merce Cunningham Centennial, and on April 16, what would have been Cunningham’s 100th birthday, the John Cage Trust hosted a macrobiotic dinner party for three dozen guests who were able to view live streams of “Night of 100 Solos,” a Merce Cunningham Trust extravaganza that took place that day and night in London, New York, and Los Angeles. Later that year the John Cage Trust staged the first Cage/Cunningham Music & Dance Circus at Bard College’s marvelous Spiegeltent, and still later hosted the second annual “John Cage Mycology Weekend” at Bard, with a guided mushroom foray in our extraordinary natural environment as well as a day-long symposium. The year 2019 also saw the publication of Love Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham, edited by Laura Kuhn and published by the John Cage Trust, which contains the most significant letters Cage wrote to Cunningham during the early period of their blossoming romance, 1942–46.

In 2021, realized by former Wave Farm Resident Artist Aaron Dilloway, John Cage’s Rozart Mix saw its first installation at Bard College, installed entirely within the John Cage Trust’s Wilson House. This installation was an expansive, multi-level, visual, and sonic work, with collaborating tape players including Rosie Actor-Engel, Twig Harper, C. Lavender, Quintron, Robert Turman, and John Wiese. In keeping with Cage's score, a minimum of 88 tape loops were employed. The tape loops ran on 12 reel-to-reel decks positioned in various rooms and floors of the John Cage Trust building, winding up stairs and around furniture. Visitors, who registered in advance for scheduled indoor viewing sessions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were immersed in a kinetic and audible drawing. Outdoors, visitors were welcomed with hot cider for a durational stereo mix of the installation, which was also streamed online at wavefarm.org/listen. A live FM radio broadcast took place on Wave Farm's WGXC 90.7-FM from 4 - 6 p.m. As in the first performance of Rozart Mix in 1965 at Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the content on the tape loops included field recordings as well as voices; however, in this new iteration, the sound materials were sourced from the over 100 volunteer programmers who contribute programming on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM. This event served as a culminating celebration of WGXC's 10th Anniversary year.

Laura Kuhn retired in 2025, succeeded by Jeffrey Lependorf as its first new Executive Director since the founding of the John Cage Trust.

Archives and Business

Jeffrey Lependorf, Director
John Cage Trust
1309 Annandale Road
Red Hook, New York 12571
(001)(845) 752-2500
(001)(917) 293-8009 (mobile)

info@johncage.org

Useful Contacts Regarding Rights

 

Music Uses, Rights, and Reproductions:

John Cage is represented by Wise Music Group, who in 2023 became a major shareholder of Cage’s former music publisher, Edition Peters/C.F. Peters. Use the following contacts to explore sheet music purchases and rentals, licensing, reproduction rights, and general permissions; when guidance is needed, contact Jeffrey Lependorf, Director, John Cage Trust, info@johncage.org 

 

For synchronization (use of music in works on film and video):

us.licensing@wisemusic.com*
*with a cc to Marybeth.Coscia-Weiss@wisemusic.com

 

For grand rights (use of music in works for stage):      

Contact either Marybeth Coscia-Weiss or Iris Torres:
Marybeth.Coscia-Weiss@wisemusic.com
Iris.Torres@wisemusic.com

 

For reprints and reproductions, contact Faber Music:

licensing@fabermusic.com*
*with a cc to Owen Summers at owen-summers@fabermusic.com, both when writing to Faber Music or when attempting to order, rent, or purchase Cage scores, which may involve communication with Finks Music.

For all other (including novel or particularly gnarly) rights questions, contact Marybeth Coscia-Weiss, Marybeth.Coscia-Weiss@wisemusic.com

 

Visual Art Uses, Rights, and Reproductions:

As Margarete Roeder of the Margarete Roeder Gallery, Cage’s gallerist in both New York City and Cologne, passed away in late 2023, for all questions concerning use, rights, and reproductions of Cage’s visual art works, contact: Jeffrey Lependorf, Director, John Cage Trust, info@johncage.org.

For questions specifically about Cage’s visual art works created at the Mountain Lake Workshop, predominantly watercolors, contact: Ray Kass, Director, Mountain Lake Workshop, raykass@gmail.com.

For questions specifically about Cage’s visual art works created at Crown Point Press (prints, etchings, and the like), see https://crownpoint.com. For further information, contact: info@crownpoint.com / (415) 974-6273.

For all other questions, including gallery and museum loans from the John Cage Trust’s permanent art collection, contact Jeffrey Lependorf, Director, John Cage Trust, info@johncage.org.

 

Literary Works, Uses, Rights, and Reproductions:

For inquiries pertaining to works published and held in copyright by Wesleyan University Press, contact: Suzanna Tamminen, Editor-in-Chief, Wesleyan University Press, stamminen@wesleyan.edu.

For inquiries involving all other written works by John Cage, contact Jeffrey Lependorf, Director, John Cage Trust, info@johncage.org.

 

Manuscript and Correspondence Rights and Reproductions:

For information about the John Cage Music Manuscript Collection held at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, see www.nypl.org/locations/lpa/music-division; for further information, contact: Dave McMullin, American Music Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, music@nypl.org.

For information about the John Cage Correspondence Collection, Notations Collection, and Other Relevant Cage Holdings held at the Northwestern University Library, see https://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/music; for further information, contact: Greg MacAyeal, Curator of the Music Library, Distinctive Collections, Northwestern University Library, g-macyeal@northwestern.edu.