Robert Cogan

Robert Cogan (born 1930) is an American music theorist, composer and teacher.

He studied at the University of Michigan (B.M., 1951; M.M., 1952); Princeton University (M.F.A., 1956); 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, Philippe 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 (Banff Festival), China, France (IRCAM), Paris; Avignon and Nice Festivals), Germany (Darmstadt summer school for new music); North and West German Radios; Zinzig Festival; University of Bielefeld), Great Britain (Universities of Edinburgh, London, and Southampton), Italy (Gubbio and Prix Italia festivals; Italian Society for Musical Analysis; Rockefeller Bellagio Study Center), Korea (Seoul Arts Olympics), the Netherlands (International Computer Music Association), Russia, Sweden (Swedish Institute for Electronic Music), Switzerland (Montanea Festival), and Yugoslavia (Belgrade Radio-Television). 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 Educators National Conference; Music Teachers National Association; Society of Composers; Society for Ethnomusicology; and Society for Music Theory; as well as in universities throughout North America.