Robert Cogan


Robert Cogan is an American music theorist, composer and teacher.
He studied at the University of Michigan ; Princeton University ; Royal Conservatory of Brussels; Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood; and the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hamburg. His principal teachers included Nadia Boulanger, Aaron Copland, Ross Lee Finney, Philipp Jarnach and Roger Sessions.
For more than three decades Robert Cogan has been Chair of Graduate Theoretical Studies and Professor of Composition at New England Conservatory, Boston. He has also been a visiting Professor at the Berkshire Music Center; at State University of New York at Purchase; at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, and Shanghai Conservatory; and at IBM Research.
As speaker and/or composer Robert Cogan has been programmed in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia. In the United States he has appeared under the auspices of the American Society for Aesthetics; College Music Society; Ford, Morse, Rockefeller, and Rothschild Foundations; International Association for Semiotics; League of Composers; ; Music Teachers National Association; Society of Composers; Society for Ethnomusicology; and Society for Music Theory; as well as in universities throughout North America.
Performers of Robert Cogan's works include the conductors Tamara Brooks, Lorna Cooke deVaron, John Heiss, Jacques-Louis Monod, Fredrick Prausnitz, Gunther Schuller, and Leopold Stokowski; the Cleveland Orchestra, Hamburg Radio, and RIAS Berlin orchestras; pianists Geoffrey Burleson, Marilyn Crispell, David Del Tredici, David Hagan, Robert Henry, and Ellen Polansky; instrumentalists Esther Lamneck, Alexei Ludewig, and Stephanie Key; and singers Jan De Gaetani, Elizabeth Keusch, Joan Heller, Jane Bryden, and Maria Tegzes. His music appears on the Delos, Golden Crest, Leo, Music and Arts, Neuma, and Spectrum recording labels.
Robert Cogan resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his partner, composer and theorist Pozzi Escot.

Selected compositions

;Orchestral
;Chamber music
;Organ
;Piano
;Vocal
He has also published in numerous journals including College Music Symposium, Interface, Journal of Music Theory, Musical Quarterly, Perspectives of New Music, and Sonus.