Biography
Lou Cohen has composed music since age 11. He studied mathematics at MIT, and has studied music privately. Composition teachers include John Cage, Ernst Levy and Alan Kemler. He studied harpsichord and early music performance practice with John Gibbons. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
In the early 1960s Cohen promoted new music in the Boston area by producing concerts in collaboration with Christian Wolff, in which the New York School was heavily represented. For a long time afterwards while working as a software engineer and product development consultant he composed in isolation. In April 2004 he produced his first concert in more than 40 years, in collaboration with the electro-acoustic group ONDA.
Since then he has appeared as a laptop improviser in numerous concerts in the Greater Boston area. The laptop software created by Cohen responds to movements of wiimote game controllers, and uses Csound to create sounds. Over the years he has performed with many fine musicians, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Christian Wolff, Ken Ueno, Tim Feeney, James Coleman, Lou Bunk, Joshua Jefferson, Andrew Eisenberg, Vic Rawlings, David Tudor, Jack Wright, Katt Hernandez, Forbes Graham, Paul Hoskin, and Andrea Pensado. His collaborations with video artist Bebe Beard, and his own computer animations have been shown in many galleries and film festivals around the world.