Robert Cogan: Difference between revisions

Robert Cogan

Robert Cogan (b.1930) has pursued a triple career as composer, music theorist, and teacher, and is noted as an explorer of challenging new domains of composition and music theory.

He studied at the University of Michigan (B.M., 1951; M.M., 1952); Princeton University (M.F.A., 1956); Royal Conservatory of Bruxelles; Berkshires Music Center, Tanglewood; and Staatliche Hochschule fuer Musik, Hamburg. His principal teachers include Nadia Boulanger, Aaron Copland, Ross Lee Finney, Philippe Jarnach and Roger Sessions.

For more than three decades he has been Chair of Graduate Theoretical Studies and Professor of Composition at New England Conservatory, Boston. He has also been a visiting Professor at the Berkshire Music Center; at State University of New York, Purchase; at the Central Conservatory, Beijing, and Shanghai Conservatory; and at IBM Research.

His books include "Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music" and "Sonic Design: Practice and Problems" (both with Pozzi Escot; published by Prentice-Hall and Publication Contact International), and "New Images of Musical Sound" (Harvard University Press). The latter won the Society for Music Theory's "Distinguished Publication Award" in 1987. He has published in numerous journals including "College Music Symposium", "Interface", "Journal of Music Theory", "Musical Quarterly", "Perspectives of New Music", and "Sonus".

As speaker and/or composer he has been programmed in Belgium, Brazil, Canada (Banff Festival), China, France (IRCAM, Paris; Avignon and Nice Festivals), Germany (Darmstadt Summer Institute for New Music; North and West German Radios; Zinzig Festival; University of Bielefeld), Great Britain (Universities of Edinburgh, London, and Southampton), Italy (Gubbio and Prix Italia Festivals; Italian Society for Musical Analysis; Rockefeller Bellagio Study Center), Korea (Seoul Arts Olympics), the Netherlands (International Coputer Music Association), Russia, Sweden (Swedish Institute for Electronic Music), Switzerland (Montanea Festival), and Yugoslavia (Belgrade Radio-Television). In the United States he has appeared under the auspices of the American Society for Aesthetics; College Music Society; Ford, Morse, Rockefeller, and Rothschild Foundations; International Association for Semiotics; League of Composers; Music Educators National Conference; Music Teachers National Association; Society of Composers; Society for Ethnomusicology; and Society for Music Theory; as well as in universities from coast to coast.

Performers of his works include the conductors Tamara Brooks, Lorna Cooke de Varon, John Heiss, Jacques-Louis Monod, Fredrick Prausnitz, Gunther Schuller, and Leopold Stokowski; the Cleveland, Hamburg Radio, and RIAS Berlin orchestras; pianists Geoffrey Burleson, Marilyn Crispell, David Del Tredici, David Hagan, Robert Henry, and Ellen Polansky; instrumentalists Esther Lamneck, Alexei Ludewig, and Stephanie Key; and singers Jan De Gaetani, Joan Heller, Jane Bryden, and Maria Tegzes. His music appears on the Delos, Golden Crest, Leo, Music and Arts, Neuma, and Spectrum recording labels.

Robert Cogan resides in Cambridge, Massachuestts.