Student Composer Wins Award

(05/26/2009)    Nell Shaw Cohen, who grew up in Sag Harbor and in

Nell Shaw Cohen

San Francisco, has been awarded the Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music.

    The alliance is a global network that works to promote the contributions of women composers and music scholars. The award is named for the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, and it is given to emerging artists 21 and under.

    In her winning piece, “Forming Desires,” Ms. Cohen set work by Muhammad Iqbal, an early 20th-century poet and philosopher, to music for contralto, clarinet, horn, and cello. The work premiered in October at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where Ms. Cohen recently completed her first year of undergraduate study with a Grammy-nominated composer, Michael Gandolfi.

    Ms. Cohen, who is the daughter of Burt and Deborah Cohen of Sag Harbor and San Francisco, said that parts of the piece were composed “during slow days” at work at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, where she worked last summer. She has also set to music texts by Walt Whitman, Rumi, St. Augustine, and Michelangelo.

    “My music is often inspired by extra-musical ideas,” Ms. Cohen said. Her two largest projects this year were an orchestral piece inspired by the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and a five-movement string quartet based on the five paintings in Thomas Cole’s “The Course of Empire.”

    Ms. Cohen, who will be 21 in August, is a primarily self-taught musician who focused on progressive rock as a composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist under a stage name, Nell James, before turning to classical music. Her 2006 original album, “Tempus,” received favorable reviews in music journals here and abroad.

    She participated in last year’s Playhouse Project master class in East Hampton, where she was awarded a special Elizabeth Brockman Award for composition. There she met Geoffrey Simon, a conductor, and Heather de Haes of the Swiss Global Artistic Foundation. Now one of the foundation’s featured artists, she is also the recipient of the Francis Judd Cook Scholarship for Students of Composition at the New England Conservatory, where she organized premieres of seven of her compositions this year.

    Samples of her music can be heard at Ms. Cohen’s Web site, www.nellshawcohen.com.    J.P.