Stephen Cohn
Stephen Cohn is a composer internationally recognized for his music for the concert stage and scores for feature films, television, theater and commercials, as well as the Internet. A native of Los Angeles, Mr. Cohn received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music for a chamber orchestra score used in the Public Broadcasting Service documentary Dying With Dignity. His scores have been used in many other award-winning productions featuring such stars as Lily Tomlin, Joanne Woodward, Kathleen Quinlan, Colleen Dewhurst, William Shatner and Wallace Shawn. His concert works have been performed and recorded by the finest chamber music ensembles in the United States and Europe. In addition, his career includes songwriting for major labels such as Motown Records, A&MRecords and Warner Bros. Records. Because of his skills with composition and orchestration, as well as with Sibelius Software, Mr. Cohn assists leading Hollywood composers in the music-notation program and has taught its use at the University of California, Los Angeles. He now seeks to promote healing through music by stirring one’s soul.
FROM THE COMPOSER
"The Family of God"
Mr. Cohn’s harmonic, contrapuntal piece in four sections observes that humanity has created divisions from its religious differences, that some people consider their beliefs superior and that this sense of superiority continually leads to war. It then asks how we can honestly justify in our hearts, and to our children, the rivalrous behaviors that stem from our beliefs. Indeed, perhaps we can teach ourselves, and then our children, that our differences do not have to create divisions, that our contrasts do not have to produce conflicts and that the variations in our beliefs do not have to bring violence to our lives.
My spiritual path began with a quest to find the source of creativity. Being a composer, I wanted to discover the origin of the musical ideas which flashed into my mind. It led to an exploration of many spiritual and religious writings. From the beginning, I was struck with the observation that they all seemed to be drawing from the same mystical source of wisdom and energy and arriving at the same core values. Over the years, my conviction about this observation has grown stronger, and I believe the importance of creating an awareness of this inherent spiritual unity has become urgent. The text for The Family of God was created by taking quotes, with some paraphrasing, from spiritual works of many cultures and placing them next to each other, thus showing the unity of the deeply held truths and values. The work is composed of four sections: The first section deals with the notion of divisions between and among people. Section Two reflects on how we can be arrogant in our worship. Section Three deals with the question of how we can be divided in war. The last section, which does not use quotes, ponders how we explain our divisiveness to our children, ourselves and our God. The musical structure corresponds to that of the text. The sections are separated by short instrumental interludes, with the last being a development of the first. There is a harmonic/melodic motif consisting of two voices (sometimes with octave doubling) that begin in unison. Then one voice moves a half-step above, then a whole step below, the stationary voice. This occurs in the introduction and at the beginning and end of each section, except for the end of the last section, which is a celebratory coda. The choral writing is mostly in four parts, with a few instances of divisi into eight parts. The harmonic style is a free-floating tonality, with a predominance of non-triadic chords over triadic. The harmonies and the contrapuntal lines were determined by the text and by my desire to open the listener’s heart and mind to the message’s essence. -Stephen Cohn
