Joseph Kun’s experience teaching and playing coupled with his work as a luthier drove him develop the Kun shoulder rest in 1972. The company celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

Jul 29, 2022 · Joseph Kun at his workbench (Photo: David Roberts, ARPS) An Ottawa company is celebrating 50 years of success, and a violin shoulder rest model that is used by millions of musicians worldwide. Joseph Kun applied for a patent for his original “violin support” in 1969, and it was granted in 1972.

Apr 8, 1996 · Born on April 13, 1930 in Czechoslovakia, Joseph Kun was a renowned craftsman known for creating violins and violin bows for international classical musicians, such as Janos Starker, Mischa Maisky and Mstislav Rostripovitch.

Price History. - The auction record for this maker is $3,300 in Nov 2023, for a bass bow. - 31 auction price results.

After the suppression of the Prague Spring reforms, music professor and craftsman Joseph Kun flees his native Czechoslovakia, making his way to Ottawa, Canada’s capital. Joseph sees an opportunity in the NAC with its own orchestra housed in a fashionable Brutalist building.

Modernist master Richard Neutra designed this home for Joseph Kun, a native of Hungary and publisher of the Los Angeles Examiner. Built between 1935 and 1936, the home overlooked the Los Angeles basin from its perch in the hills near Laurel Canyon.

Joseph Kun came to Canada in the wake of the Soviet crackdown that ended the Prague Spring in 1968 in what was then Czechoslovakia. In his homeland, Kun was a teacher of music, he even lectured at the famed Moscow Conservatory.

Joseph Kun (b. 1930 - d. 1996) was born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated to Ottawa in 1968, where he began a multi-faceted career of crafting fine bows and violins, inventor of the Kun shoulder rest, and co-author of "The Art of Bowmaking".

Kun has won many awards for his work as well as co-authoring "The Art of Bow Making" with Joseph Rech. Kun is also credited with training Reid Hudson in the 1970s who is now a sucessful in-demand Bow maker in Canada.

Within a few years, Joseph Kun, the former head of pedagogy for Slovakia and a self-taught luthier, had established himself on Ottawa’s orchestral music scene, and begun hand-making an invention he’d brought with him from his homeland: the first Kun shoulder rest. When Joseph met and married Marina, the