Joel Cohen, Who Gave Boston Camerata Its International Voice, Dies at 84

Joel Cohen, the American lutenist, conductor, and musicologist who ran Boston Camerata for forty-five years and turned a regional early-music ensemble into one of the field's defining international voices, died July 26 in the Boston area at 84. His wife, the soprano Anne Azema, who succeeded him as the Camerata's artistic director, announced the death.

Cohen took over the Camerata in 1963, when 'early music' barely existed as a professional specialty in the United States outside a handful of university curiosities, and used the ensemble as his instrument for four and a half decades, building an approach to medieval and Renaissance repertoire grounded in what would later be formalized as historically informed performance: playing the period's music with the period's own instruments, tunings, and performing conventions, rather than translating it into a modern orchestral idiom.

His reach extended well past his own ensemble's stage. Through the 1970s he worked as a broadcaster and producer for American public radio and for Radio France, and at the French network he originated a concept he called the 'Saturnales de la musique' -- later credited as one of the conceptual seeds for France's Fete de la Musique, the nationwide June 21 music festival that has since been adopted by cities worldwide. It is a strange kind of legacy: the format outlived and outgrew the man who first sketched it, to the point that most of the millions who now spill into the streets for it each summer have never heard his name.

His discography carries its own historical footnotes -- a 1979 Harmonia Mundi recording of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas that was among the first to use period instruments, 1978's Musique judeo-baroque, and a 1989 Erato account of Jean Gilles's Requiem. He remained the Camerata's director emeritus after handing over the ensemble in 2008, present enough at its edges that its current identity is still, in large part, an argument he started sixty years ago.