Jonathan Cohen Talks Composition and His Love for Low Flutes

A conversation between Jonathan Cohen, composer for the flute and a low flute enthusiast, and Erika Skye Andres, a fellow low flute lover.

(Andres) Hi Jon, So glad to be talking with you today about your musical journey!  Now while you have written a lot for flute, I know that you started with a different career other than music.  Can you please give us a little bit of background on yourself and what originally got you into playing flute and composing?

(Cohen) My music “career” began when I played clarinet in school, but it was not an auspicious start: I had a horrible tone, and the fact that I didn’t really learn to read music then was an issue. In my senior year of high school I set the clarinet down for the last time and picked up the guitar and taught myself to play. Then I went off to study electrical engineering. I had thought from a very early age that engineering was what I wanted to do, and I was extremely lucky because it turned out that I liked it as much as I thought I would and I was pretty good at it too. I continued banging away at the guitar every once in a while.

And then one day I was with my wife at a craft fair, and she purchased this wooden flute by Patrick Olwell for me. Patrick was one of the best craftsmen of traditional flutes, and he made copies of pre-Boehm flutes from the Dayton Miller collection. This flute was made out of rosewood without any keys on it, so I started to study Irish traditional music with the amazing Chris Norman, who was one of the best people playing Irish music on this continent. But I still had the problem where I couldn’t read music. I would go in for a lesson, turn on my tape recorder, and have him play my homework that I would go off and work on. But I was rubbish at memorizing music, so I would play a piece and make mistakes and play a piece and make more mistakes until I decided to put my flute away for the sake of marital harmony!

Then, because of my guitar playing and singing so-called experience, I was asked to join in a rock band with people at work, all engineers and computer scientists. We were called “More Toys Than Talent”, a brutally honest name. We even made a CD of original music called “Keeping Our Day Jobs”! When asked to join the band, my response was to get a regular metal flute. Moreover, I vowed to “read the manual”, that is, to actually take lessons, something uncharacteristic of us engineers who are used to kicking something until it works.

In self defense, my wife (who had majored in trumpet for a year before switching to mathematics) decided to pick her trumpet back up. After getting her lip back, she joined a community band, and I went with her in support and played in the flute section. For the first night, I had the goal of playing one note right per line. That proved too ambitious. But I had a very supportive group of people around me, and I eventually grew into it. Then one day Laura Benning asked members of the flute section of the band to join a flute choir she was starting up with others; soon I was playing in “Flutes on the Brink”. So by being in both the band and flute choir, I started to learn very quickly.

Soon after, there was a snow storm that closed the state for three days. I had previously purchased Finale, the music notation software, and I ended up writing a one minute flute choir piece. With great trepidation, I brought it to rehearsal and they made the mistake of encouraging me, so I expanded it and it ended up becoming my first piece, “Helen’s Backyard”. We performed it at Sharyn Byer’s Columbia Flute Choir Festival, and composer Rick Pierce, who was in the audience, badgered me to publish. Eventually, I sent it off to Falls House Press and Linda True kindly published it. That was the first in a chain of Falls House Press publications.

Then I heard that something called the “Professional Flute Choir” at some convention (it turned out to be the 2005 National Flute Association Convention) was playing my piece, “Now In Two Flute Flavors”, so I decided to go. Everyone was so nice, I was sucked in, and I have been back every year since. And every year since then something of mine has been on the program.

You play the concert flute of course, but you also play a lot of low flutes including contrabass flute.  What attracted you to low flutes?

While playing with “Flutes on the Brink”, I noticed someone there playing this cool looking instrument, a bass flute! I went and got one, and many times I ended up being the only one there playing bass. Often, the object of playing flute in band is to play fast, high notes, but playing the bass in flute choir I was often playing slow, low notes, and it was quite a different experience.

And then I got Tiny, my contrabass flute. And that gave me a lot of opportunities: people wanted me for my instrument! And so I was invited to play with the Metropolitan Flute Orchestra, a group of 60 to 80 flutists directed by Paige Long that comes together in the Boston area in July. Its heavy metal section always has many contrabass flutes as well as a sub in G and a double contra. With them, I got to travel to many amazing places to perform like Kroměříž Castle, Hampton Court Palace, Edinburgh Castle, and Iceland’s premiere performance space: Harpa Concert Hall.

I eventually became the president of Flutes on the Brink, served two terms on the Low Flutes Committee of NFA, and formed “Two Redheads and a Deadhead” with the Nicole Nikolov and Jeanette Donald, and the J2N2 Project with Jeanette, Nicole, and Noreen Friedman. And I kept writing!

You have written lots of flute compositions, having published over 70!  They are for many different instrumentations but a great number are for flute choir or low flute choir, and several of which have won awards by the National Flute Association!  Congratulations!  I am also very fond of your many titles with puns and play on words like “Flutes and Vegetables” and “Baroquen Red Lights”. They are all very original names for very original pieces!  We have seen a couple of your works for flute choir, so let’s highlight a few for small ensembles.

What are your future plans?  Are there any other flute compositions we should be expecting soon?

A few years ago, I collaborated with the amazing Greg Lutz to write a flute and piano composition called Athena’s Widsom for gifted high schooler Athena Konidaris’ senior recital. Greg first wrote all the piano parts and then I had to write the flute part that went with them! We have now just finished doing another similar collaboration for Athena’s college senior recital, and this piece will be called Athena’s Triumph. She will premiere it this fall.

Where can we listen to your other music, and how can interested flute choirs get hold of the scores to your music?  Where can we contact you?

My web page is www.FluteComposer.com and it has recordings of all my pieces and links to where you can buy the scores.  My contact info is on there as well.

Thank you so much for talking with me, it is a pleasure to speak with a fellow flute aficionado!  I, and I am sure the rest of the flute community, am grateful for your dedication to the instrument and for writing so much for flute. Any final thoughts?

I plan to keep on writing music, and I hope I can keep performing at the National Flute Association convention in large ensemble and chamber concerts. And I do hope that people come to the conventions and hear all the music!