Interviews
and Panels
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LISTEN HERE (Interview can be heard 1 hour into the recording)
Meta joins Lyric Opera of Melbourne Artistic Director Patrick Burns to discuss their new song cycle and opera-in-development, Kiss My Sword.
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Composer and dramaturg Meta Cohen says they approach their music like a dramaturg and their theatre like a musician. It’s a creative combination that’s led to their choral and vocal writing being a finalist in the 2023 Art Music Awards. They join Andrew Ford to talk about all that plus their ABC-commissioned song cycle a love is a love is a love.
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Meta was a panellist in the Postmillennial Dramaturgies in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand event, Critical Stages, held at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2024)
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Meta was a panellist in the Dramaturgical Thinking: a creative conversation about Australian dramaturgy event, chaired by Chris Mead, held at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2023).
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Meta discussed their artistic practice in an interview with the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne
Awards
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Meta’s piece Swerve was a finalist in the 2023 APRA AMCOS/Australian Music Centre Art Music awards for Work of the Year: Choral
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Meta’s piece Caedo won third prize in the 1st Leonardo da Vinci International Composition Competition in Florence, Italy
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Meta was awarded the GLOBE Victoria scholarship award for artwork supporting the Victorian LGBTQIA+ community.
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Meta’s piece we was selected as part of the official Australian Section submission to the ISCM World New Music Days 2023.
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Meta was awarded the ABC’s inaugural composer commissioning fund for their song cycle a love is a love is a love.
News
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Recently, Meta was awarded a residency at Visby International Centre for Composers in Visby, Sweden. VICC is the ISCM Section for Gotland (Sweden). Meta was granted the residency to work on their new opera, Kiss My Sword.
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The album features “Meta Cohen's extraordinary song cycle a love is a love is a love, ‘a love letter to queerness and the LGBTQIA+ community’: an affirmation of sexual desire and romantic love, but also of the myriad other kinds of queer connections, from platonic love, friendships and kinships to the experience of navigating the world as a queer person.”
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Meta is one of five composers commissioned for the Sydney Chamber Choir’s 50th Anniversary celebration, along with Paul Stanhope, Nardi Simpson, Anne Cawrse and Luke Byrne.
Meta is the youngest of the composers commissioned.
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Meta’s queer song cycle ‘a love is a love is a love’ was released as an EP album by ABC Classic. The work was commissioned as part of the ABC’s Composer Commissioning Fund.
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Meta was a featured artist across the ABC and Australian Music Centre for Australian Music Month 2022
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ABC News Article: Singing the life stories of regional LGBTQI+ Victorians into the history books.
Meta was featured for their work on Homophonic’s RESPECT project. Meta’s piece Swerve was created for this project, which forges connections between generations and documents the lives of LGBTQIA+ regional Victorians through song.
Reviews
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‘Meta Cohen’s Meteora was a shining star-map of longing and cosmic possibility. Inspired by the idea of two people gazing at the same stars from different places, it captured that ache of love across distance. The tenor and bass duet pulsed with intimacy while the choral textures opened like galaxies. At the climax, the sopranos blazed into their highest register and the whole choir rang out with a kind of radiant desperation.
Meteoric!’- Pepe Newton, ClassikON
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‘Meta Cohen’s Meteora was a celestial and elemental work filled with a sense of longing and suspended time. Its shimmering textures evoked the vastness of the sky and the yearning for someone far away, creating a haunting and otherworldly atmosphere, truly a captivating odyssey beyond the ordinary.’
- Faith Jessel, What’s On Sydney
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‘The last of the new commissions, Meteora by Meta Cohen, was the most expressively varied, simultaneously creating a sense of distance and intensity.’
- Peter McCallum, the Age, ★★★★
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‘Melbourne composer and dramaturge Meta Cohen, a champion of LGBTQIA+ culture, captures “the strange intimacy of long distance relationships” in their piece Meteora to words written by sibling Leona, in which the narrator imagines looking up at the sky at the same time as their lover.
This was a splendid, beautifully performed golden anniversary celebration.’- Steve Moffatt, Limelight, ★★★★1/2
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'[Meteora] was the most complex work musically - about the yearning associated with love, full of celestial references’
- Evie Apfelbaum, Sydney Arts Guide, ★★★★★
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‘Meta Cohen’s Kiss My Sword has much to get excited about. The vocal writing is fiendishly virtuosic at times with a sprawling text by Evan Bryson that appears to construct and then deconstruct the life of queer French contralto, lover and swordswoman, Julie d’Aubigny.
[…]
It was clear that this work-in-progress shows a lot of promise, particularly in Cohen’s evident flair for florid vocal writing that compellingly captures the essence of the protagonist – a fearless Queer icon whose life blurs the lines of myth and history. Cohen’s use of post-minimalist devices such as repetition, and sprawling lines that flow continually from the voices of the technically gifted sopranos Jessica Aszodi and Breanna Stuart were a highlight of the night.’-Stephen Marino, Classic Melbourne
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Meta Cohen’s Delphi Songs […] dramatizes the last known words of the Oracle of Delphi Pythia (eventually silenced by the Roman Empire). Van Os sang a powerful rendering of a woman’s power in both quiet moments and total rage. When van Os sang “Words that called down the lighting…” and flung charges against the interior rot of a falling empire, a real thunderstorm shook Brooklyn.
- Lana Norris, I Care If You Listen, New York
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‘This 4-part cycle bristles with a rich tapestry of evocative music-making.
Each movement is titled with a single pronoun – you, they, she, and we – insightfully traversing a spectrum of everyday queerness. It received a lovingly embracing performance, each vocalist acting as a precious part of a refined chain with confidence and joy in abundance. That joy was contagious. And comforting.’- Paul Selar, Australian Arts Review
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‘The program continues with a triptych [including] Meta Cohen’s Caedo […] , the choice of which was inspired by the endless cycles of human violence and brutality we continue to witness. The full power of the whole ensemble of players and singers together is visceral and very moving’
- Susanne Dahn, Theatre Travels
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‘Swerve is an important work drawn from oral history. The panel noted how the sometimes frenzied sound world of voices and strings appropriately depicted the subject's career as a driver and life on the road.’
- Judging Panel, Art Music Awards 2023 - What The Judges Said
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‘The concert’s finale was the commissioned piece (i)dentity by Meta Cohen. The piece negotiates complex, multifaceted identities with aid of a Gertrude Stein text.
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Cohen smartly captures both the pain and joy of figuring out one’s identity, turning the text inside out and tangling it up until it becomes hard to follow. “I am I” is a repeated refrain throughout the piece, which Cohen gives different colours from the beautifully bright to the quietly sad and the stressfully dissonant. It is a piece that tangles and untangles itself a thousand times, surging and receding fragments of identity in joy and pain, carried gorgeously by Divisi. This piece showcases Divisi at their best, giving them a chance to shine in extremes. It was a powerful, energetic, well-rounded and perfect end to the concert.’- Annalyce Wiebenga, Farrago Magazine
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‘Meta Cohen’s (i)dentity [was] perhaps the most ambitious and complex work on the program. […]The rhythmic drive through the piece underpinned an excellent grasp of independent lines anchored by a repeated refrain.’
- Peter Campbell
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‘Meta Cohen’s Sim Shalom, [...] sung by the male voices only, has beautiful introspective passages that were sung with great sensitivity by the singers.'
- Len Power, CityNews