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MIT to hold Edward Cohen Memorial Concert

Cambridge, MA... A memorial concert for Edward Cohen (1940-2002), who was a senior lecturer in music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 25 years, will be held on Sunday, April 27 at 8:30 p.m., in Kresge Auditorium (48 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge). Kresge Auditorium is handicapped accessible. This event is open to the public, and admission is free.

The MIT Chamber Chorus, conducted by William Cutter, will perform Cohen's Invisible Cities, a work commissioned in 1995 by the Council for the Arts at MIT. The work uses texts drawn from the novel by Italo Calvino which relate Kublai Khan's responses to Marco Polo's tales. The performance will feature David Kravitz, baritone and Majie Zeller, mezzo-soprano, with the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble Combo performing music of Thelonious Monk.

Also on the program are two works by Irving Fine: two movements from The Hour-Glass ("Lament" and "O know, to end is to begin") and the four-movement Choral New Yorker.

Born in New York City in 1940, Edward Cohen played piano and trumpet and attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. While writing music in a classical vein, he was inspired by jazz and improvisation and was devoted to new music. As a teenager he worked as a jazz pianist at resorts in the Catskills, and he retained an avid interest in jazz throughout his life. He frequently entertained family and friends with sparkling and original renditions of jazz standards.

Cohen's formal musical training, however, was entirely classical. He received the B.A. with honors in music from Brandeis University in 1961 and the M.A. in 1965 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he won the Ladd Prix de Paris, which sponsored two years of composing in Paris. During his studies at Brandeis and the University of California at Berkeley, Cohen's teachers included Irving Fine, Seymour Shirfrin, and Luigi Dallapiccola.

Cohen joined the MIT faculty as a Lecturer in 1977 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1982. He taught Introduction to Western Music as well as theory subjects during his first decade at MIT but later taught exclusively in the theory program acting as the coordinator for the Harmony and Counterpoint sequence of courses.

"Most people know me more as a teacher than a composer, but I've been composing seriously throughout my years at MIT," Mr. Cohen said in a 2001 MIT Tech Talk interview. "In the mornings I compose at home, and in the afternoons I come in to MIT and teach."

Although he was strongly focused on the creation of new music, Cohen also found time for other pursuits. He spoke French fluently and had a lifelong interest in French literature and film. He was a determined distance runner who ran the Boston Marathon four times in the 1970s.

For more information, call (617) 253-2826.