Joel Cohen

Joel Cohen, (born 1942) was the Music Director of the Boston Camerata from 1968 to 2008. He remains connected to the Boston Camerata as Music Director Emeritus. Cohen founded the Camerata Mediterranea in 1990 and incorporated it as a nonprofit research institute in France in 2007. He has collaborated very frequently with French soprano Anne Azema. His professional honors include the Signet Society Medal (Harvard University), the Howard Mayer Brown Award, the Erwin Bodky Award, and the Georges Longy Award. He was a government-appointed artist-in-residence in the Netherlands during the year 2000, and is an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic. Cohen studied composition at Harvard University. He was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and spent two years in Paris as a student of Nadia Boulanger. In the 1970s he spent two seasons as a producer of musical radio programs for the French National Radio (France Musique), where he originated the concept of an all-day musical celebration on the days of the solstice. This annual event is currently known as the "Fete de la Musique" also known as "World Music Day".

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