Steven Mark Kohn recreates American Folk Music
Cleveland composer Steven Mark Kohn is somewhat of a rarity these days, in that he is one of the few faculty members at the Cleveland Institute of Music who actually grew up in Northeast Ohio. Another contradiction is that he prefers to write music that can be performed on an old upright piano in a barn, with only a candle for illumination. Yet he teaches electronic music, and is in fact, in charge of the Electronic Music Studio at CIM.
He grew up entertaining his school-mates by playing new pop tunes on the piano – by ear. He didn’t learn to read music until his senior year of high school (at Brush), and was like, “Whoa! I get this.” So he headed for the closest college with a music program—which happened to be at Kent. Luckily for him it had, as he puts it, “a very solid theory department”. His Masters came from CIM where he studied with Donald Erb. “Those university years transformed my life,” he says.
It was at CIM that he met Jim Brickman (another local boy made good) and together they spent five years writing and arranging commercials for TV and radio, before Brickman took his show on the road. Kohn continued this kind of writing, though, for another ten years on both a local and national basis.
Kohn has no regrets about staying here. “I’ve found the CIM electronic music studio to be exhilarating fun for these last thirteen years. The students at CIM are very talented. I’ve learned a lot from them. CIM is an oasis of creativity and progressive thought—I feel it every time I enter the building.” He found a song publisher, located in Arkansas, who also promotes Kohn’s work. One of his biggest successes (to date) is a re-arrangement of old American Folk Songs, written as an alternative to those set by Aaron Copland.
“I was listening to ‘I bought me a cat’ for maybe the thousandth time, and I thought, “We need some alternatives to Copland’s arrangements. To me, the Copland is a little sparse. I prefer the sweep of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ English folk song arrangements. So I bought books and more books: the folk collections of the Lomax’s and Carl Sandburg, cowboy tunes, Appalachian songs, nearly everything but spirituals (I didn’t feel qualified to meddle with them). The more I studied, the more I was impressed by how melodically interesting and dramatically compelling they were. Whoever came up with these tunes in the first place had great instinct. He (or she) was a real tunesmith, even if there was no musical training. They are culturally and historically meaningful as well. I wanted to expand and embellish them, giving them more shape and scope. Help tell the story.”
“So, I moved words around, did a bit of slicing and dicing, even added new words on occasion and wrote extended piano accompaniments. It was a lot of fun. I was able to get my first five-song set published. The next thing I knew, David Daniels was performing them at Carnegie Hall. Then Andrew Garland did them at the Phillips Gallery in Washington DC. I got busy working on another five-song set, and eventually did a third set, totaling fifteen in all. And they’re being performed more and more these days.”
In fact, five of them will be performed this coming Sat 11/20 at First Baptist Church in Cleveland Hts., when Opera Per Tutti presents a program of American Music. Soloist will be Benjamin Czarnota, with Marge Adler accompanying him.
Because of his fondness for this type of music, Kohn has also composed a dramatic art song cycle for soprano. Based on the diaries of Mary Chesnut, a confederate woman of the Civil War era, the piece was commissioned by mezzo soprano Jennifer Larmore. The 50-minute piece is in its final editing phase now.
But doing the American Folk Songs Settings was a great joy for the Cleveland composer. “Arranging these songs has been a real pleasure and I hope they will be performed long after I’m gone. I’ve always liked to mix it up musically; do a lot of different things. I’ve designed an electronic music studio (at CIM), which is so empowering and capable of so much, but at the end of the day, it feels good putting music on paper that can be handed to someone. There is something permanent about it.”
How fitting that this is old music made new again.
Opera Per Tutti’s (http://OperaPerTutti.org) Americana will be presented at 7:30PM by Music and Art at First Baptist on Fairmount Blvd in Cleveland Hts on Sat 11/20. There is no admission charge. To discover more about Steven Mark Kohn, and to hear more of his music, visit his website: http://www.StevenMarkKohn.com. The CD of his American Folk Song Settings, On the Other Shore, includes all 15 songs, sung by Andrew Garland with Donna Loewy on piano. It is available from Cleveland-based Azica Records — #ACD71244. http://Azica.com/records/SSS-SMK.html.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Kelly Ferjutz, who writes: My most recently published book is Ardenwycke Unveiled (e-book and trade paper). Cerridwen has another contemporary romance from me, But Not For Love, currently available only as an e-book, but perhaps will be in print later this year. I hope to soon get around to completing some of the 30+ incomplete books in my computer!Actually, I’ve just re-issued my very first published book (from Berkley in NY 1993) Secret Shores which is available now in regular print, plus large print and as a Kindle.
By the way, Cerridwen has also accepted two of my short stories in their Scintillating Samples (complimentary reads) area: Song of the Swan and Unexpected Comfort. I love photography as well, as you can see here. Occasionally I teach writing workshops and sometimes do editing or ghostwriting on a free-lance basis. But over and above everything else, there’s always been the writing. I can’t imagine my life without it.
And now, after more than a few requests, I’ve started a blog about writing. You can find it here.