Joel Cohen

Joel Cohen (born 1942) is an American musician specializing in early music repertoires. Cohen graduated from Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island in 1959, and Brown University in 1963. He continued graduate education at Harvard University. From 1968 to 2008, he was the director of the Boston Camerata, a prominent American early music ensemble. He remains connected to the Boston Camerata as Music Director Emeritus. Cohen founded the Camerata Mediterranea in 1990 and incorporated it as a nonprofit research institute in France in 2007. He plays the lute and guitar, as well as sings. He is best known as an organizer and creator of concert programs and sound recordings. He has also written extensively on musical topics. 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 collaborated very frequently with his wife, French soprano Anne Azéma, the Artistic Director (since 2008) of the Boston Camerata, and has also worked with numerous choirs, including the Schola Cantorum and student choruses at Brown, Brandeis, Harvard and other universities. His professional honors include the Signet Society Medal (Harvard University), the Howard Mayer Brown Award, the Erwin Bodky Award, the Georges Longy Award, the Grand Prix du Disque (France) and the Edison Prize (Netherlands). He was a government-appointed artist-in-residence in the Netherlands during the year 2000, and is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic.

Cohen studied composition with Randall Thompson at Harvard University, and musicology with Gustave Reese, Nino Pirotta, John Ward, and Elliot Forbes, at that same institution. 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” also known as “World Music Day”.

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