I Care If You Listen: 5 Questions to Yuga Cohler

I Care If You Listen
Jacob Kopcienski

Yuga Cohler has garnered attention as a conductor for brilliant performances and an organizer of highly inquisitive, and at times bold, performance projects. His membership in the Asia/America New Music Institute (AANMI) an organization dedicated “to promoting new music relationship between Asia and the Americas,” is yet another instantiation of these qualities. 

Featuring the AANMI Los Angeles ensemble under Cohler’s direction, AANMI’s recent debut album, Transcendent, showcases works by member composers across Asia and North America performed by violinist Ryu Goto, bass-baritone Davóne Tines. We asked five questions to Cohler to discover more about this project as well as its place within the transcultural mission of the AANMI.

To read the interview, click here.

The Atlantic: What Classical Music Can Learn From Kanye West

The Atlantic
Spencer Kornhaber

The conversation around Kanye West lately has focused on politics, stunts, and the phrase scoopity-poop. It can be easy to forget that it was his musicianship, not provocations, that built up enough goodwill for him to go on a five-week spree of releasing one album a week (at least one of which, apparently, was put out in unfinished, soon-to-be-revised form).

Some of those albums—Nas’s Nasir and Teyana Taylor’s KTSE, both produced by West—feature string arrangements and vocals by the Yale-trained composer and pop artist Stephen “Johan ” Feigenbaum. He had, in a way, gotten West’s attention by drawing attention away from the noise around West and back to his music. Since 2016, Feigenbaum and the conductor Yuga Cohler have periodically put on performances they call “Yeethoven,” including two in Los Angeles and one at New York City’s Lincoln Center. With a contingent of classical instrumentalists, they trace the similarities between the works of a 21st-century rapper/producer and a 18th- to 19th-century composer.

Read more here.

Strings: Yuga Cohler on Forging a Career as a Conductor in Classical Music

Strings
Whitney Phaneuf

Yuga Cohler is on a mission to disrupt the classical-music establishment. And he already has its attention. The 28-year-old conductor, who debuts as the music director at Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra (RSO) on May 5, gained international prominence last year with his project Yeethoven, an orchestral concert comparing the works of Beethoven and Kanye West that culminated in a sold-out show at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in January.

Cohler recognizes that his new post at RSO will require a different approach than his recent success with Yeethoven, which played in Los Angeles and New York, but he’s not deterred from taking risks altogether.

“Becoming a professional music director is a milestone in the path of a conductor. But I am interested in how to incrementally push the consciousness, to push the public relevance of the orchestra and classical music as an institution within a vibrant community,” Cohler says, by phone from his home in Boston. “To make the value and the worth of classical music relevant and abundantly clear to the community you’re serving, and to allow people to enrich themselves through classical music—not in a forceful way, not a neocolonialist way, but like, ‘Hey, you like this? Maybe you’ll like this, too’—is the conductor’s number one job, at least now in America, and that is what I’m looking forward to doing there.”

Read more from Yuga's interview here.

KUSC: Behind the Festival Uniting Classical and Electronic Music

KUSC
Brian Lauritzen

The worlds of classical and electronic music come together this weekend in Little Tokyo. It’s all part of a concert and community arts festival hosted by the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Chamber Orchestra and dreamed up by YMF music director Yuga Cohler and composer Stefan Cwik. The event will combine the music of Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, and LA-based DJ and electronic musician Flying Lotus in a unique concert experience. Yuga Cohler tells me it’s an outgrowth of how young people consume music today.

Yuga Cohler: I grew up studying and playing classical music. But I also grew up with the internet: I had Napster when it came out and I’ve been exposed to a lot of different types of music just because it’s so available. My thought is that any art form sort of has to have both value and relevance to the current age. It’s important that people who consume the art are able to derive something of value from it. So for me, what that means in a classical music context is two things: first of all, I do believe that classical music has a lot to offer in terms of depth of emotion, complexity of structure, the subtleties involved with it, the amount of passion and commitment that it demands. I also believe that there’s a lot that all sorts of other types of music have to offer in those areas and also in terms of relevance, in terms of reflecting our current society’s thoughts and values. I think it provides a useful mirror into what our society is today. So, finding the intersection point between those two—of the values that classical music has to offer and the values that other types of music have to offer seems to me a very natural thing to do.

Read the full interview here.

BBC Music Magazine: Yeethoven - Kanye Hear Us, Ludwig?

BBC Music Magazine

Beethoven and Kanye West are not two names you'd expect on the same concert bill, let alone spliced together. But conductor Yuga Cohler and his Young Musicians Foundation Debut Chamber Orchestra have had other ideas.

Read more in the February issue, available here.

WQXR: Yeethoven - Great Minds Think Alike: Kanye West vs. Beethoven

WQXR
James Bennett, II

Kanye West and Beethoven

After the success of 2016’s Yeethoven composer and arranger Johan and conductor Yuga Cohler have returned for Yeethoven II, a concert focused on the similarities between the artistry of Kanye West and Ludwig van Beethoven. Besides just having a great name — who wouldn’t want to explore the limits of that wondrous portmanteau — the creators of the project see it as a way to explore the ways in which artists at the top of their game can have a deep impact on the culture beyond their musical influence.

With Kanye’s release of 2013’s Yeezus, the Yeethoven creators were taken by his abandonment of verse-chorus-verse conventions of most popular music and his embrace of a freer, more adventurous sound. Johan and Cohler worked backwards to find Beethoven, but believe their connections fit. For example: the dynamic shifts in the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony share a similar quality with Kanye’s “Blood On the Leaves.”

Some may bristle at the mere mention of these two names in the same breath, but if you look hard enough, it isn’t difficult to find parallels between the two — or of many great artists, for that matter.

For the full story by WQXR, click here.

Ridgefield Press: Yuga Cohler takes over as Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra music director

The Ridgefield Press
Laurie Kenagy

After a search process that spanned two seasons and saw four exceptional finalists conduct concerts before large and enthusiastic audiences, the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra has named Yuga Cohler as the orchestra’s new Music Director.

Cohler will make his debut in his new role at the May 5, 2018 concert at Anne S. Richardson Auditorium at Ridgefield High School. The RSO Board of Directors appointed Maestro Cohler following the unanimous recommendation of the Music Director Search Committee comprised of RSO musician representatives, board members and executive director. The Search Committee received extensive input from surveys sent to RSO musicians and audience members following each of the finalists’ concerts.

Read the full article here.

MWA Quarterly: Notes on a 21st Century Virtuoso, Yuga Cohler

MWA Quarterly
By Karine Monié

FROM MUSIC TO TECH, YUGA COHLER EVADES CLASSIFICATION, USING HIS BRILLIANT MIND TO CREATE INNOVATIVE, ONE-OF-A-KIND EXPERIENCES

Music has always been part of Yuga Cohler’s life, but it took him a few years to feel passion for it. “Both of my parents are musicians, so I started at a very early age— piano at 3 and violin at 5,” he says. “However, I didn’t really start enjoying music until I was 12, when I went to my first music camp.” Since then, Cohler has never put aside creative discipline, which today is an important part of his life.

At only 28 years old, Cohler is already an internationally-known orchestral conductor, while also working as a senior software engineer and manager at Google, having graduated summa cum laude in computer science from Harvard University. “My grandfather is a computer scientist and he taught me QBasic when I was 6,” he says. “It aroused my interest in math, logic and puzzles. I think that an understanding of the systemic facets of technology that my work cultivates—an appreciation for design, an apprehension of large-scale systems, a belief in process—is essential to anybody looking to engage in 21st-century culture.”

As if it isn’t enough to be a science expert, Cohler is also a musical genius. These seemingly disparate fields are complementary for Cohler. “My junior year of college, I interned at Goldman Sachs as a strategist in the investment banking division,” he confesses. “I worked 11- to 12- hour days and listened to Kanye West all day long at my desk. Through that experience, I came to understand that the structures underlying Kanye’s music are no different from those that underlie classical music, and thought it would be interesting to put on concerts that explicitly point out similarities like these.”

Appointed music director of the Young Musicians Foundation (YMF) Debut Chamber Orchestra in Los Angeles in 2015, Cohler explored this idea of combining popular and classical music through “The Great Music Series,” starting with “Yeethoven,” a concert that boldly compared the works of Kanye West and Beethoven. “Many of the best cultural innovations are born from combinations of distinct traditions,” explains Cohler, referencing modern cuisine as an example. “Popular music owes much of its theoretical backbone to the tradition of Western classical music, and I think the values inherent in classical music can help popular music evolve in interesting ways. At the same time, classical music can learn from the iron-clad ties to modern-day culture by which popular music is defined.”

Listening to hip-hop, electronic music, Korean and Japanese pop, among many other genres, Cohler’s open mind and impressive path are a testament to both his talent for and love of innovation that he showcases all over the planet. Having a close relationship with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, Cohler appeared several times in concert on Japanese national television and recently did an international tour with the orchestra and musician Yoshiki. Frequently invited to Europe and different places in the United States, and currently a director of the Asia/America New Music Institute, Cohler is successful in everything he does. Although Cohler is unconvinced that music is essential, “...I think it’s inevitable,” he offers. “You don’t need music to survive, but if you’re surviving, you’re probably either consuming or producing music. For me, music is a platform through which you can reach anybody, because it’s not tied to any predetermined meaning. That lack of intrinsic significance makes music an ideal medium for a type of universal communication.”

Reaching all types of communities through the vitality of an orchestra, transcending categories while inventing another, more global vision is definitely among Cohler’s most impressive skills. With his creativity and ambition exceeding music, Cohler describes his dream project: “A start-up/media company that produces content designed to make its audience think more deeply and deliberately. It would promote and provoke thought by integrating the expected with the unexpected, the commonplace with the extraordinary, the popular with the sophisticated.” Some people are born with many talents and they know how to make the most of them. Whether through music or technology, Cohler always finds a way to create something unique from a variety of influences.

Time: How a Live Orchestra Is Mashing Up Kanye West and Beethoven

Time Magazine
By Raisa Bruner

Rap icon Kanye West and classical legend Ludwig van Beethoven are, at first glance, polar musical opposites. But one project, dubbed Yeethoven, is bringing their music together in a bi-coastal mash-up concert that cuts through the distance of centuries and styles.

But why Kanye and Beethoven? It comes down to their shared status as iconoclasts of their eras. “[Beethoven] was emblematic of making really dynamic and meaningful changes in his art form, just as Kanye does in his,” explains Yuga Cohler, one of the project’s creators. “You might think Kanye’s one thing and only certain types of people listen to it, and ditto Beethoven. But that’s actually not the case.” Instead, project masterminds Cohler and Johan — who goes by a single name — argue that there’s a “common musical and cultural backbone” that runs straight from classical to contemporary hip-hop. Bringing the two genres together in live symphony, they hope, can help listeners discover a new way to appreciate music, no matter their age or musical taste.

Taking place in L.A. on Dec. 14 and in New York City on Jan. 18 with support from the Young Musicians Foundation (YMF) and Lincoln Center, Yeethoven II is now in its second year, after a sold-out 2016 concert. Cohler regularly conducts the YMF Debut Chamber Orchestra, while Johan is an independent artist and producer and arranger for hip-hop and pop acts like rapper Vic Mensa and singer Alessia Cara.

TIME spoke to the duo about their process of piecing together the perfect orchestral mash-up, how a “risky project” like this one can help popularize classical music and why Kanye makes a great case study as an artist with unexpectedly broad appeal.

TIME: Why did you select these two artists to bring into dialogue? What makes them good parallels?

Yuga Cohler: I had always been a big fan of Kanye’s music, and I knew other musicians were as well. I was really interested in doing a project with the [YMF] Orchestra involving him. So the first person I called was Johan, who was studying composition at Yale at the time. We talked about comparing [Kanye] to Stravinsky and a bunch of other classical composers, but we settled on Beethoven.

Johan: We were trying to figure out why classical musicians find Kanye so compelling, especially on his last two albums [2013’s Yeezus and 2016’s The Life of Pablo]. We were trying to find a classical musician who had a similar impact on their time.

Why is Kanye particularly interesting to classical composers?

Johan: He’s a risk taker, really innovative. He gets away with things musically that are pretty radical for someone who gets that attention: the fact that millions of people listen to his albums; the fact that Yeezus was borderline unlistenable as pop music, but really interesting as more of an art project, as well as The Life of Pablo. I was around a lot of composers and found they were interested in the fact that this guy was doing such crazy stuff. When I was in grad school at Yale, I studied with David Lang, a Pulitzer-prize winning composer. He was like, “Oh, Yeezus is really good.” This dude is like 55, and he’s talking to us about how Yeezus was really cool!

Cohler: Johan and I thought about this a lot. In those two albums, he willfully deviates from the traditional verse-chorus format, which is obviously a hallmark of pop music. The decision to do that, and then the decision to branch out into other, new formal language, was really reminiscent to us of what classical composers constantly try to do.

How do you create music that’s a true dialogue between the two artists? What’s your process like to figure out how to mash it up in a way that makes sense?

Cohler: We’ll go through the track listings of Yeezus and The Life of Pablo and we’ll talk about which songs are most interesting or have elements that are most reminiscent of Beethoven or classical composition. Then we ask, what are compositions by Beethoven that do the same thing? Is there sonic similarity, is there cultural similarity, is there compositional similarity? From there, Johan arranges and orchestrates them.

Johan: It always starts with the Kanye. That has to be turned into an orchestral thing, no matter what. It’s not like we’re running through the whole song; we’re grabbing the iconic material from a song of his. We’ll get the 16 bars or something that are really iconic, figure out how to make that sound unbelievable with an orchestra, and then figure out a way to add the Beethoven and develop them to interact. It’s important that the pieces communicate what we’re talking about. If they’re both there, we want people to recognize each piece of material separately before they start to hear them intertwined, so people can really get what’s going on. That’s a big part of the whole concert for us: making it clear.

Was there a particular Kanye song that was especially successful — or challenging — to adapt?

Cohler: For me it’s the arrangement of “Waves.” It’s hard to describe; the melody is in bass, but the accompaniment is in treble, which is this sort of unique thing. We compare that to Beethoven’s 8th Symphony, which is an unlikely candidate. But when you bring the two together, you can actually hear how the voicings are very similar.

Johan: It’s the second movement of the 8th Symphony, right?

Cohler: Yeah.

Johan: They were pretty tricky. We also did one with “Ultralight Beam” and a quartet —

Cohler: It’s the string quartet of Op. 132 — the slow movement from that.

Johan: That was about trying to show these really spare elements. They’re both really slow and spread out, so finding a way to keep the momentum going while illustrating how much space there was in both of these was tricky to keep it as a compelling piece of music. But I think it came out well.

You’ve spent a lot of time exploring the Kanye-Beethoven mashup. Are there any other pairings you’re interested in?

Johan: Personally, I think something with Daft Punk would be cool.

Cohler: It has to be a really organic connection. I don’t think it works to make this into a trope — one classic composer and one pop artist — that cheapens the art. Kanye is very special, I think everyone would agree.

Johan: There’s few people who are simultaneously doing stuff as weird as he is and on as such gigantic a scale in terms of reach.

Have you ever reached out to him? Do his people know you’re doing this?

Johan: I think he knows, but we don’t know for sure. I do string arrangements for the hip-hop world, so… We’ll see what happens.

What do you hope audiences take away from listening to this?

Cohler: One of the really positive aspects of the show in 2016 was that so many different types of people came. It was definitely not your typical hip-hop or pop concert; it skewed a little bit older. It was absolutely not at all your typical classical concert; it was much younger than that. You have people of all different backgrounds, bound by either this interest in Kanye or the concept. There’s this common musical and cultural backbone to both of them, and we can all appreciate it in a single group. That’s the message of the whole thing.

Johan: People are smart and discerning listeners of music. Those same people who were applauding at Kanye were also applauding at the Beethoven stuff; they were just excited about good music.

KUSC: What Happens When You Mix Beethoven and Kanye West?

KUSC

Yuga Cohler and Johan take the stage during a performance of “Yeethoven”

The worlds of classical music and hip-hop may seem too far apart to ever come together in any meaningful way. However, two artists (and a youth orchestra) are looking to remix the way we think about these two different art forms: composer/arranger Johan and conductor Yuga Cohler, the music director of the Young Musicians Debut Chamber Orchestra.

Together, Cohler and Johan have put together a concert of mash-ups of the music of composer Ludwig van Beethoven and hip-hop artist Kanye West. The project is called Yeethoven and premiered last year. Now, they’re back for Yeethoven II, taking place on December 14 at the Belasco Theater in Downtown Los Angeles.

For more information about the project, I interviewed Johan and Cohler.

BL: Where did this idea for combining the music of Beethoven and Kanye West come from?

J & YC: We both have been interested in Kanye’s music for years, and so have many of our friends in the classical world. We wanted to examine what it was about his music, especially on his last few albums, that was so compelling to us as classical musicians. The idea of putting Kanye West side-by-side on a concert with a similar iconoclast from the classical world, such as Beethoven, seemed like a really cool way to illustrate it for people.

BL: From a musical/structural standpoint, what sorts of similarities are there between Beethoven’s and Kanye’s music?

J & YC: Starting with his album Yeezus, Kanye’s music moved away from traditional song formats and towards more freely developed “pieces”. This allowed him to feature extreme juxtapositions between material of different characters, to a degree that felt very Beethovenian to us. For example, the sudden dynamic contrasts found in Kanye’s “Blood on the Leaves” struck us as similar to the subito character changes in the famous Fifth Symphony. Our concert focuses on six of these parameters for comparison, with a pair of pieces illustrating each one.

BL: How did you assemble the scores? What led you to make the musical decisions that you made?

J & YC: We began by finding Kanye songs that felt most conducive to these types of comparisons, while also being likely to translate well to the orchestral format. Simultaneously, we looked for pieces by Beethoven that housed similarly innovative structural elements and held long discussions about what common musical kernel defined both the Kanye song and the Beethoven piece. Johan then transcribed the Kanye works and orchestrated them, finding specific instrumentations that would approximate the sound of the original songs. Once he had an orchestrated version of each Kanye excerpt, he developed them into full pieces.

BL: How big, do you think, is the Venn diagram intersection area of classical music lovers and hip-hop lovers? Do you think there are more classical fans who enjoy hip-hop or more hip-hop fans who enjoy classical?

J & YC: That’s a great question. Many young classical musicians have very wide-ranging taste, and many also have what feels like a newish desire to reach outside of the classical music community. Hip-hop is probably the most adventurous genre of popular music right now so it makes sense that it would receive a lot of attention from curious young musicians. Going the other direction, it’s harder to say. Fans of adventurous pop music seem to respect classical music a lot without necessarily consuming that much of it. We’re both very interested in changing this.

BL: How have audiences responded to Yeethoven?

J & YC: More enthusiastically and attentively than we ever could’ve dreamed, honestly. We talk briefly throughout the concert about the formal elements in each piece, and last year we witnessed the audience erupting into spontaneous applause when the exact techniques we referred to appeared later in the actual music. That level of perception from an audience mostly unused to classical concerts was something we never anticipated.

BL: It feels like genre is becoming less and less important to music consumers. I get the sense that most people categorize music into two groups: “stuff I like” and “stuff I don’t like.” Are you seeing that also?

J & YC: That definitely seems accurate. The way streaming platforms organize music allows people to move much more fluidly between genres. There are still boundaries, but they seem to have more to do with the context in which people want to experience music. Someone might have a wide variety of genre-spanning works which are unified only by the fact that they like to study to them, and a separate, equally wide range of music they like to experience at a party or on the dance floor. In our view, classical music at its best is a spectacular emotional and sensory experience, and can most effectively cater to people seeking that type of immersion.

BL: Anything else you’d like to add?

J & YC: We’re just really grateful to YMF for taking a risk on this event with us. It matters more now than ever that organizations like that are open to experimenting with the way classical music fits into the public consciousness.

The Young Musicians Foundation Debut Chamber Chamber Orchestra performs Yeethoven II on December 14 at the Belasco Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. Johan is the composer/arranger of the show. Yuga Cohen, music director of the YMFDCO, will conduct.