Joel Cohen
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Joel Cohen, (b. 1942) is an American musician specializing in early music repertoires. Since 1968 he has been the director of the Boston Camerata, generally considered to be the pre-eminent American early music ensemble. Cohen founded the Camerata Mediterranea in 1990. He performs on lute and guitar and sings, but is best known as an organizer and creator of concert programs and sound recordings. In recent years Cohen's research and performance activities have centered on early American repertoires (including Shaker song), as well as southern European repertoires of the Middle Ages. Many of his projects in this latter category involve collaboration with Middle Eastern musicians.
He has worked a great deal with French soprano Anne Azéma and also worked with numerous choirs, including the Schola Cantorum and student choruses at Brown, Brandeis, Harvard and other universities.
Cohen studied composition at Harvard University. He was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and spent two years in Paris as a student of Nadia Boulanger. In the 1970s he spent two seasons as a producer of musical radio programs for the French National Radio (France Musique), where he originated the concept of an all-day musical celebration on the days of the solstice, an idea later to be adapted as a national celebration each June 21 in France. This annual event is currently known as the "Fête de la Musique".
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[edit] Work in early American music
Cohen's interest in American vernacular traditions dates from his childhood lessons on folk guitar, and his experience in later student years as a jazz bassist. He was introduced to southern shapenote hymnbooks by his mentor at Harvard University, the composer Randall Thompson, and by Alan Lomax's field recordings of Sacred Harp sings. Cohen later travelled to the South on several occasions to participate in Sacred Harp sings and conventons. His first program with the Boston Camerata involving extensive treatment of early American oral and written sources was "The Roots of American Music" (1976), released as an Advent cassette, and later re-recorded (1986) as "New Britain". The commercial success of this last recording, released after a lapse of several years by the French label Erato, leads Cohen and the Erato label to record a series of early American programs with the Boston Camerata, including "The American Vocalist", "Trav'ling Home", and "Liberty Tree". For the 1992 celebration of the Columbus year, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival invite Cohen and the Camerata to prepare a program of early Hispanic repertoire from the New World. This project becomes "Nueva España", recorded by Erato and subsequently one of the Boston Camerata's most requested touring programs.
Cohen, the Boston Camerata, and the Shakers
Informed by a colleague of the Shaker library at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, and its extensive musical holdings, Cohen travels to that still-functioning religious community to do research on Shaker manuscript sources. He and his wife, soprano Anne Azéma, also begin an enduring personal relationship with the members of the community, who agree to record and perform their music in the company of the Boston Camerata and collaborating choirs. Two CD's of Shaker song ("Simple Gifts" and "The Golden Harvest") commemorate these collaborations, which continued for several seasons from 1992 forward.
In 2004 Cohen and the Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen create a dance piece, "Borrowed Light", using live Shaker music. This production has toured extensively in France, Germany, England, Sweden, Finland, Italy, and the United States.
[edit] Partial Discography
[edit] with the Boston Camerata
- The American Vocalist
- Trav'ling Home: American Spirituals, 1770-1870
- The Liberty Tree: American Music 1776-1861
- Carmina Burana
- Musique Judeo-Baroque
- Nueva España
- The Sacred Bridge: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe
- Simple Gifts: Shaker Chants and Spirituals
- The Golden Harvest: More Shaker Chants and Spirituals
- New Britain: The Roots of American Folksong
- What Then Is Love?
- Gilles' Requiem
- A Medieval Christmas
- Noel, Noel: French Christmas Music 1200-1600
- A Baroque Christmas
- A Renaissance Christmas
- A Mediterranean Christmas
- An American Christmas: carols, hymns and spirituals, 1770-1870
- Sing We Noel: Christmas Music from England and Early America
[edit] with the Camerata Mediterranea
- Bernart de Ventadorn: Le Fou sur le Pont
- Lo Gai Saber
- Cantigas of Alfonso el Sabio with the Abdelkrim Rais Ensemble of Fez, Morocco (Edison Prize, 2000)
