Karl Kohn was born in Vienna in 1926 and immigrated to the United States in 1938. He served as an army band-member and postmaster on the island of Tinian during World War II. Prof. Kohn studied at the New York College of Music and at Harvard under Walter Piston, Irving Fine and Randall Thompson. He was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Helsinki, and held fellowship grants from the Guggenheim, Howard, and Mellon Foundations, as well as four fellowship-grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Prof. Kohn is the W. M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Pomona College in California, where he taught from 1950 to 1994. He also taught several summers on the faculty of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. With his wife, Margaret, he gave two-piano concerts for several decades throughout the U.S. and Europe, emphasizing 20th-century repertoire. His own works have been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestras, the Oakland Symphony, and many others. The majority of his works are self-published.

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