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Gerald Cohen (born 1960, New York, N.Y.) has earned distinction as a composer of both concert and liturgical music, and as a cantor and performer. Cohen’s compositions are published by Oxford University Press and Transcontinental Music Publications. A CD of his compositions, entitled Generations, is on the Composers Recordings, Inc. label, and includes chamber, choral and solo vocal works, including performances by the composer.

He recently completed his first opera, Sarah and Hagar, based on the story from the book of Genesis, with a libretto by Charles Kondek. The first act of the opera was performed in concert version in May 2005; the complete opera will have a concert performance in 2010.

Recent honors in composition include the 2008 Borromeo String Quartet Award of the Aaron Copland House, a 2007 Aaron Copland Award, the Westchester Prize for New Work, the American Composers Forum Faith Partners residency, and the Cantors Assembly’s Max Wohlberg Award for distinguished achievement in the field of Jewish composition.

Cohen has received commissioning grants from Meet the Composer/National Endowment for the Arts and from the New York State Council on the Arts/Westchester Arts Council; residencies at The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Yaddo; as well as Yale University's Sudler Prize for outstanding achievement in the creative arts.

Cohen’s music has been commissioned by choruses including the New York Virtuoso Singers, the Canticum Novum Singers, the Syracuse Children’s Chorus, St. Bartholomew’s Church (New York, NY), the Zamir Chorale of Boston, and the Usdan Center Chorus; by chamber ensembles including the Franciscan String Quartet, the Eastern Shore Chamber Music Festival, the Degas String Quartet (with trombonist Haim Avitsur), the Wave Hill Trio, the Bronx Arts Ensemble, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic Brass Quintet; by the Cantors Assembly of America, the Westchester Youth Symphony, and by the Battery Dance Company, which performed his Songs of Tagore on tours of India and Eastern Europe.

His music has also been performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the San Diego Symphony, the Westchester Philharmonic, the Riverside Symphony, the Plymouth Music Series Orchestra, the New York Concert Singers, Princeton Pro Musica, and many other ensembles and soloists.

Cohen received a B.A. in music from Yale University and a D.M.A. in composition from Columbia University. He is Cantor at Shaarei Tikvah Congregation in Scarsdale, N.Y. and is on the faculty of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

View all albums by Gerald Cohen

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