Stephen Cohn

Composer Stephen Cohn’s interests span genres: after an early career writing pop songs, he’s penned television themes, film scores, CDs for meditation, and full orchestral works. His career spans generations: early on he studied under Walter Scharf, the award-winning composer who’d worked with George Gershwin and Rudy Vallee, and today he’s one of the music industry’s leading practitioners of software-based orchestration. But his muse is rooted in the timeless melodies of American culture.

“There’s a great tradition among composers, which is to take the folk music of their countries and push the envelope with it, bring it into a contemporary idiom, keep it alive,” Cohn says. “These are such great melodies. They resonate inside of us.”

On March 25, the Kansas City Symphony will premiere Cohn’s orchestral work “Finale from Two Together: An American Folk Music Suite” at the Midland Theater, as part of a program that will also include works by Aaron Copland and John Williams. “Finale” was featured on the 1993 family entertainment CD that netted him a Gold Award from the Parents Choice Foundation.

Cohn, who also owns an Emmy for scoring the 2001 Joanne Woodward documentary Dying with Dignity on PBS, is not only an accomplished Sibelius user – he teaches the software to other professionals in Hollywood.

“I had seen Sibelius in a comparison of notation programs at an expo in 2001,” he recalls. “I was very impressed with it, and I just went out and bought it. I went home and buried myself in it for a week and a half and became very devoted to it.”

Since he was already teaching a film scoring extension class at UCLA, it wasn’t long before he introduced Sibelius to his students. “The students told me after their third session with me, they were already doing their film scoring with Sibelius, faster and better,” he says. “That’s a statement about how easy it is to use the program.”

“Certain parts of composing and orchestrating are hard labor – the writing things out by hand,” Cohn explains. “It’s a lot of physical work that takes quite a bit of time, and it slows down the part that goes from the creative process to the actual realization. It slows it down so much that it discourages a certain amount of experimentation.”

“With Sibelius, a lot of experimenting and orchestrating can be done very quickly. You might take a piano part and assign the first line of the piano part to the flutes and violins, just by clicking. Without Sibelius, you’d have to write it out by hand. Or if you’re taking ten pages of orchestral tutti and you want to repeat it somewhere, that could be several days of writing out or more, as against just clicking.”

But Sibelius is about more than just productivity, he adds.

“There’s an element of fun in using Sibelius, because it’s interactive,” he notes. “Composers sit in a room by themselves and they do a very solitary thing, which sometimes can be kind of lonely. Parts of the process are tedious. But Sibelius is interactive – you put music in, you can listen to it back immediately, you can make changes very quickly, and it’s very exciting to reduce the amount of time between the creative flash you have and the realization of it on paper.”

Though his extension course at UCLA is a thing of the past, Sibelius has made Cohn an ambassador for its software. He is the secretary of the 100-member Southern California Sibelius Users Group, and offers individual tutoring in the program’s nuances – to pupils who include “includes Lalo Schifrin, David Benoit, David Newman, Eduardo del Barrio and quite a few others,” he says.

For up-and-coming composers without names like those, Sibelius skills aren’t a luxury, Cohn advises.

“It’s just absolutely essential these days,” he says. “I don’t see how you can get along without it, with the time constraints that are put on composers. If you want to be able to work at the speed that is required in the commercial music industry, you really need to have these skills. In classical circles also, people are used to getting these beautifully printed scores. It’s a new standard.”

The Kansas City premiere of “Finale” isn’t Cohn’s only big date in 2006; in New York in October, he’ll debut a new piece for choir and chamber orchestra commissioned by Universal Sacred Music.

“Spiritual music is a fairly new avenue for me, going back to about 2002,” Cohn says. “Universal Sacred Music is an organization that is creating a repertoire of choral music that is spiritual but not religious. I write my own text, and that’s what’s inspired this whole idea of writing choral music. It started with me writing a poem on the subject of peace, and it struck me that it might be good in a choral setting.”

Cohn says the breadth of his professional repertoire, remarkable to many observers, is perfectly logical.

“It looks like diversity from the outside,” he says. “For me, it’s just a natural interest I have in a lot of different kinds of music. I grew up in a household where my father was an attorney who wrote serious class music as a very passionate hobby. (In addition, his mother was a dancer and violinist, and his sister holds a Ph.D. in flute.) From a very early age I was exposed to very serious concert music, and I was exposed to a passion for writing music.”

As for the traditional American themes with which he likes to inform his compositions, don’t look for Cohn to raise any generational alarm. “I don’t think these traditions are in any danger,” he says. “They’re woven into our American heritage; people love this music. This stuff is really fun to listen to. The beauty of the music itself will keep it alive.”

To learn more about Stephen Cohn, please visit his website at: http://www.stephencohn.com/