ARCHIVE

Victoria Miguel is a UK-based writer, teacher, publisher, and producer, who fell in love with John Cage while in college during an art history lecture at the University of Edinburgh. Kuhn and Miguel have had a long relationship, since after her graduation, Miguel moved to New York to work with Kuhn at the John Cage Trust while simultaneously completing a Master of Arts degree in Liberal Studies at the New School University, her thesis being an imaginative exploration of the work of Cage and Samuel Beckett through their shared interest in chess. We’ve chosen to speak at length here about her digital version of John Cage’s Reunion, a 1968 composition involving a game of chess played on an electrified chessboard constructed by Cage’s colleague, Lowell Cross. The initial realizations of Reunion were initially played Cage against Marcel Duchamp and, in a second round, Cage again Duchamp’s second wife, Teeny, at the Ryerson Institute in Toronto on Tues., March 5, 1968, incorporating live music triggered by the players’ chess moves as performed by Cross, David Tudor, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma. Miguel’s digital version of Reunion was first heard within Miguel’s play, Laqueria, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013. And if all this weren’t quite enough, in 2020, Victoria began a PhD in English Literature at the University of Glasgow on the subject of John Cage’s literary works.