Katie Liu and Mauritz Kop Play as House Pianists at the Stanford Law Neukom Terrace Opening (Spring 2024)

By our Editor

When Stanford Law School opened its Neukom Terrace in the spring of 2024, the music came from inside the building. Katie Liu and Mauritz Kop served as house pianists for the occasion: a Stanford student and quantum-policy collaborator on one side of the keyboard, and a technology jurist who is also a classically trained pianist on the other. It is the same culture that placed Johann Strauss on a Stanford stage and musical moments inside its responsible quantum technology conferences.

Katie Liu and Mauritz Kop Play as House Pianists at the Stanford Law Neukom Terrace Opening (Spring 2024)

Music inside the law school: a terrace opening with live piano

It is a small scene with a real point: live music gave the terrace opening a cultural dimension that a speech alone would not. The setting fits the story. The William H. Neukom Building, the light-filled academic building that Ennead Architects designed around a central courtyard and elevated garden for Stanford Law School, was conceived to make the law school a place where its community gathers, and a terrace opening with live piano is that idea made audible. Stanford Law's community has long made room for both registers, and on this occasion it let two members of its quantum-governance circle inaugurate a terrace with a piano.

The William H. Neukom Building at Stanford Law School.

The pianists off duty: how music and quantum policy share one discipline

Liu and Kop's daytime collaboration runs through quantum law and policy: Caltech lab visits, conference organization, and research within the Stanford RQT orbit on quantum computing governance and the places where quantum technology meets artificial intelligence. The terrace opening presented their musical side in a Stanford Law School setting. For Kop, whose biography records training in music theory, counterpoint, clarinet, and piano before the law, performance applies the same discipline of structure, timing, and listening to a different instrument. For Liu, who pairs computer science with music in her studies, the keyboard is the older of her two formal languages. Their pairing illustrates an overlap between technical, legal, and musical training that recurs in the quantum-governance world, where researchers move between formal systems such as scores, statutes, and source code.

Mauritz Kop and RA Katie Liu at Stanford Law School

Why this blog records the institutional life of responsible quantum technology

This blog documents the institutional life of responsible quantum technology, and institutions are made of people. A terrace opening with house pianists is a footnote, and footnotes are where a community's character shows, in this case the informal, musical dimension of a group that otherwise works on AI governance frameworks. More of the musical thread runs through Music Law at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague.

For deans, chambers, and ministries alike, the practitioner lesson is that interdisciplinary trust is built in informal rooms before it is exercised in formal ones. An institution that wants that trust does well to create the informal rooms on purpose.

Katie Liu, Concertpianist

Last updated: September 3, 2026