Frederic Cohen

Courtesy of Western Regional Archives

FOCUS

Music

ROLE

Faculty

ATTENDANCE

1942 - 1944

Frederic Cohen taught music at the college from the fall of 1942 to the spring of 1944.

He studied music at the Conservatories of Music Leipzig and Cologne studied History of Music, Philosophy, History of Art and Literature at the Universities of Leipzig, Berlin, Cologne. In his faculty application, he shared that he had experience as producer, stage director, stage manager, lecturer, conductor, composer, and pianist."

Relationships

Wife: Fellow BMC faculty, Elsa Kahl

Asheville Art Museum Collection

There are many other digitized college bulletins that mention Frederic on Asheville Art Museum's collection website: collection.ashevilleart.org. This document can be found by searching the following accession numbers:

2017.40.022 April 1943 bulletin, "Frederic Cohen’s compositions, “A Spring Tale” and “The Prodigal Son”, were recently performed in the British cities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield...

Dorothy Trayer left Black Mountain College on April 24 for Concord, New Hampshire, to take up her new duties as laboratory technician at the diagnostic laboratory of the State Board of Health. During her stay here she was College Registrar and a piano student under Frederic Cohen...

Another addition to the Music Curriculum is a Piano Seminar in which Frederic Cohen’s music students meet to become acquainted with the Piano repertoire, sight reading, analysis and ensemble playing."

2017.40.024 September 1943 bulletin,

"Black Mountain College concluded its 1942-1943 weekly radio series over Station WWNC in Asheville during the Spring Quarter. In May it presented five programs: a concert of Preludes by Bach, Chopin, and Debussy, played by Frederic Cohen and Dr Edward Lowinsky; an original dramatic script, “The Mysetry of Swift and Stella”, written by Kenneth Kurtz and Cynthia Carr, a student, and enacted by students in the literature classes; a piano concert, including Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor and Beethoven’s Bagatelles, opus 126, played by Mr Cohen; a dramatization of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey by Dora Harrison, a student, enacted by drama and literature students; and an A-Cappella concert, directed by Dr Lowinsky."

Photograph of author

Author

Amanda Hartman

Amanda Hartman is the creator of BMC Yearbook, serving as the lead director, engineer, and researcher. She holds a MLIS in archive/ collections management, MA in art/ museum education, and BA in design. After working in museums and archives for a decade, she made the transition to tech and is now a software developer specializing in applications for museums, archives, and higher education.

Her interest in Black Mountain College began while working as a digital archivist with the Asheville Art Museum's BMC archive collection. She transcribed and digitized over 1500 documents created by the college. While working closely with these archives, she began independent research on the interracial program and Negro Week activities BMC, writing biographies of lesser known students and staff members. That research transformed into this BMC Yearbook project.

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