James Cohn, 1928

JAMES COHN was born in 1928 in Newark, New Jersey. He studied composition with Roy Harris, Wayne Barlow and Bernard Wagenaar and majored in Composition at the Juilliard School. He has written solo, chamber, choral and orchestral works, and his catalogue includes three string quartets, five piano sonatas, eight symphonies and an orchestral suite entitled The Little Circus. Several works have won awards, including a Queen Elisabeth of Belgium Prize for his Symphony No.2, and an A.I.D.E.M. prize for his Symphony No.4, which was premiered in Florence, Italy. Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony introduced the composer's Symphony No.3 and Variations on the Wayfaring Stranger. His opera The Fall of the City won an Ohio University Opera Award. There have been many performances of his choral and chamber music, and worldwide use of his works commissioned for television and cinema. Major commissions include one from the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress and another, the Concerto da Camera, premiered at the the Music at Gretna (PA) Festival as the Mount Gretna Suite. Maestro Guido Six, of the Conservatory of Music in Ostend, Belgium commissioned the Caprice for Claribel, his 30-piece clarinet choir. A recent commission, The Texas Suite, was given its premiere at the Texas Music Educators Association Convention in San Antonio in 2010. Maestro Six has just commissioned a new work for Claribel, to be performed at the Midwest Clarinet Conference in Chicago in 2012.
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