Composer Profile: Stephen Cohn

When Stephen Cohn left his native Los Angeles for Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, he was on course to become a lawyer. But soon he fell in love with folk music—“It really was like falling in love,” he told me—and no practical advice from anyone would sway him from changing his major to music.

But really, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to him: his mother is a dancer and a violinist, his sister, Susan Stockhammer, a flutist, and his father an attorney whose true life-passion was writing chamber music. In fact, seeing his father unhappy—though brilliant—in his law practice but blissfully happy in his composing had a major impact on Stephen’s choices in life.

He had played folk guitar before deciding to major in music, at which time he switched his focus to classical guitar. A summer of study with the Romero family convinced him to transfer to CSUN, where he gave the first senior recital ever in classical guitar.

After graduating and continuing to practice guitar many hours a day, but with no clear career direction, he got a life-changing call from Rob Royer (eventually of the group Bread), which led to his playing with Royer’s singing group and writing vocal arrangements for them. He loved being around people who were writing songs, and along the way, he also fell in love with Bossa Nova. His song In a Blue Room was recorded by the Baja Marimba Band and was one of three of his first five songs that got recorded, the other two by Vikki Carr and Bobby Vee.

The next few years included an MCA-released album and a single produced by David Gates (also of Bread), of songs written by Stephen, Tim Hallinan, and Robb Royer for their singing group, the Pleasure Fair, which also included Michelle Cochran; a self-produced singer-songwriter album and single released by Motown—and his own billboard on Sunset!—and numerous songs he wrote that were recorded by others.

In the meantime, he took a UCLA Extension class in film scoring from Walter Scharf, who encouraged him to go back and study composition and orchestration. During this period of his life, he started attending contemporary music festivals at CalArts—“I got excited because I was hearing all kinds of new sounds!”—scored two documentaries by Ben Moses, one of which (Dying with Dignity) won him an Emmy Award; scored an independent feature film, Nickel and Dime; wrote his first string quartet, which was premiered and recorded by the Arditti Quartet; was composer-in-residence at the International Musical Encounters of Catalonia in the south of France; and taught his own UCLA Extension classes. He also wrote music for concerts and did a lot of orchestrating, including for The Matrix video game.

“But I didn’t really feel focussed on being a composer of concert music until 2008, when I got involved with the Shumei Cultural Council in Pasadena.” He considers the first of six annual commissions from them, a wind quintet for the Midnight Winds, to be his first mature concert work, and his creativity has been blossoming ever since.

And though he never had a big hit in the world of popular songs, he is grateful for having come up in that world. “Those of us who have a background in some kind of music that required us to be communicative—it paid off in being able to write music that connects with human emotion and spirit, which is ultimately the most important thing. Other kinds of music contribute to the development of musical techniques, but it is the music that people love that lives on.”

About Bellscape, the work we commissioned and are about to premiere, he told me that—understanding the mission of Pacific Serenades—“I set out with the thought of being really communicative in this piece, and on the cerebral-emotional continuum, it’s way over to the emotional side. My creative process revolves around freeing myself so that I can write those things that want to come out. One idea that kept coming back to me was ‘dreams of a distant bell,’ a surreal impression of a bell. Part of what inspired this piece is the idea that bells are very important in ceremonies, sounding beginnings and endings. This piece is a series of dreams and memories—in a stream of consciousness—that are triggered by this bell motive, which takes slightly different forms but is always recognizable.”

Though he admits that being asked to write a piece with the same instrumentation as a great work by Mozart—with which it will share the concert—was a bit intimidating, it was also intriguing. “There is a lot of dialogue among the instruments in the Mozart in a way that is much more polite and clear than what we have today. So I wanted to try to create a similar kind of dialogue, but in a more contemporary way.”

He loved the experience of writing for winds and piano, and he is very excited about the virtuosic level of our performers. We’re excited, too, to get to hear these virtuosic players breathe life into what sounds like a very inspiring piece.