Alumni Q&A: Amy Kohn ’90

There was a pretty constant musical soundtrack to my childhood. My Dad studied classical guitar, so he was practicing a lot, and we would go to these incredible parties at his guitar teacher’s house with tons of live music. My Mom is an actress and took voice lessons, and I would listen from outside in the plant-filled waiting room (it was like a forest!). We would go to hear the Chicago Symphony a lot, and there was always classical music on the stereo. My sister Liz and I used to dance around the dining room table to Antônio Carlos Jobim for fun.

 

When my Grandma Adeline and Grandpa LeRoy moved from Winnetka to California, I was heartbroken, but they gave us their upright piano, and I wanted to learn to play. Rachel Long, a wonderful piano teacher, happened to live in our building, so, starting at age seven, I would take our elevator down and another up, arriving at her velvety apartment for lessons. She was strict but loving, making sure we knew our music theory and the stories of composer’s lives. We would all dress up and pack into her living room for recitals, where we learned how to perform with poise, even in how we introduced our pieces (something I still like to do in my concerts). Music was a serious thing to be revered, but it was all kept light with gifts of plastic statuettes of Beethoven and Brahms or pencils with composers’ names on them, and she had a little box called “Su-Si-So” filled with sheet music you could borrow each week.

 

I picked up the accordion in 1995 when I moved to New York. I loved the idea that it was so portable! I became a member of the all-female Main Squeeze Accordion Orchestra, throwing my accordion on my back to take the subway to rehearsals.

One of the first songs I wrote was actually in Mr. Dreuth’s 6th grade class. We were inventing countries, and our group named ours “Nippon.” I wrote the national anthem! I could sing it for you right now: “Let peace and love spread over this land, let us safely live…”

 

Another first song was written at Interlochen National Music Camp for a friend, Patricia, who has directed many OK Go band videos and the movie Pitch Perfect 3, among others. It was a simple song telling her how much I was going to miss her when camp was over. I brought our whole cabin into the practice room to play it for her—I loved the idea of giving someone a musical gift.

 

I was lucky to receive these kinds of gifts, too: for my 11th birthday, my parents commissioned Chicago composer Michael Thorn to write a duet for guitar and piano for us, and I ended up studying with him in high school.

 

While I was in graduate school studying musical-theatre writing at NYU, I also started taking jazz lessons with Michael Jefry Stevens, a fantastic composer/pianist who lived a few blocks away from me in Brooklyn. In around 2004, when Michael packed up his piano and left New York for greener pastures, he suggested I take on a few of his students. I was intimidated at first, but the minute I started teaching one-on-one, it clicked and felt right. Over time my home studio grew to 30 students per week.

 

I just started teaching privately here in Italy (online for now!), and what I find most rewarding about teaching in general is happening with my adult student right now. I love helping people find their creative voices, and in this case, it’s literally her voice! We’re working on ear training because she eventually wants to study the theremin with a friend of mine, and she’s realizing she can sing more than one note. It’s a thrill to be part of that musical revelation for her. Simple but really meaningful.

 

I love working with students on their favorite music—pop, jazz, classical, whatever it is—but also introducing them to new composers and getting them to appreciate the joys of music theory (there are joys!). Working with students on their own compositions is the best. When I closed my piano studio in Brooklyn and left for Italy to get married, I asked each student to compose a piece for our wedding. We hung all the sheet music from ribbons in the trees at our reception.

 

Opening my Parker yearbook the other day, I found a letter from Rachel Long tucked inside. I had sent her a recording of one of my student recitals in 2011, and she wrote back: “[Students] are your blank canvas on which you will create lasting pictures and memories. You have to capture and escalate their enthusiasm for old and new music and keep it burning. Not all pupils are going to be receptive, but the joy you find in the ones you reach—the veins of gold—is indescribable.” I feel this way, too.

 

I would call my songs experimental pop. I like to push the boundaries of what a song can be and search for melodies and harmonies that surprise me when I’m writing. The music can be dissonant at times, with lots of rhythmic shifts, but I also love returning to something repetitive and catchy, a little ear candy to ground the song. Lyrics are important for me, and usually every word (and punctuation mark!) needs to feel right before I can go to the piano. The composer/arranger Van Dyke Parks once called my songs “musical bijoux,” and I like this idea of songs as little compact, glowing expressions.

 

Once the piano and voice are set, I really enjoy the arranging process—putting unusual instruments together and adding counter-melodies. My first album, The Glass Laughs Back, is the sparsest, recorded on an upright piano in my Brooklyn apartment, with voices, saxophone, cello and big plastic bottles filled with water at different levels for drums. My second album, I’m in Crinoline, is more vibrant and bombastic—lots of winds and brass and an accordion quartet.

 

My most recent, PlexiLusso, is the most orchestrated and polished. As I was working on the arrangements, I reached out to Van Dyke Parks to introduce myself, sending him the arrangement-in-progress of my song “Linguaglossa.” We ended up having a great phone conversation about instrumentation, and later I got the chance to visit his home studio in California; getting that glimpse into his process was invaluable for me.

 

I work with a great drummer here in Padua, Jimmy Weinstein, an American who also lives here. Jimmy and I started recording the core of PlexiLusso at a studio in Udine, then I went to New York (with a big pregnant belly) to record the winds, brass, harp, guitar, strings and more. I was going for a very lush and glossy feel with PlexiLusso, which extended to the artwork designed by Non-Format. The cover made Pitchfork’s Best Album Covers of 2014.

 

In terms of influences, I’ve always loved musical theatre. I would listen over and over to Grease on my record player and planted myself in front of my Grandpa Ned’s TV in Michigan every winter when The Sound of Music came on. I remember Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George really speaking to me when we saw it at the Goodman in 1987. Leonard Bernstein is also a huge influence: West Side Story, Chichester Psalms… I loved playing Debussy, Erik Satie and Scott Joplin in high school and have a soft spot for Billy Joel and Joe Jackson.

 

At Oberlin I studied composition and got more into minimalism: Steve Reich, Meredith Monk (I ended up working as her archivist and personal assistant in New York). I remember hearing a Kate Bush song from outside a dorm room and finding it jarring, but over time she’s become one of my biggest inspirations. She’s an example of a songwriter who can send you into another sound world with her wild melodies and rhythms and her inventive arrangements, but she still keeps such a hold on you.

 

I also love the French songwriter Camille, Norway’s Hanne Hukkelberg, Argentina’s Juana Molina, Germany’s Barbara Morgenstern, Joanna Newsom and music by my friends Eska, Debora Petrina and Akiko Pavolka (Akiko and I met via our CDs, which were sitting next to each other on a Brooklyn music store shelf). I often sing songs from “This-A-Way, That-A-Way” by Ella Jenkins to my son, Giordano, at bedtime. I’m interested in writing music for film, so lately I’m exploring music by Danny Elfman, and I just discovered composer Max Richter through his music for the series My Brilliant Friend.

 

 

We’re all thinking about Bart Wolgamot these days—he was a huge presence in my musical life. He had such a passion and respect for music. Can’t you just hear him leading “Come to the Fair” with massive joy? Literally days before I learned the news of his passing, I pulled out a book of Charles Ives songs that he gave to me when I went back to visit Parker. The inscription is so supportive and encouraging, like he always was.

 

There are so many people and activities at Parker that set the stage for the future, starting from our Senior Kindergarten Circus, when I asked if I could be a singer. My song “I’m in Crinoline” on my second album is about getting stuck under my dress as I’m trying to put it on backstage, warming up my voice under all of the fabric! I have clear memories of music class with Mrs. Abel, sitting in a circle on masking-taped lines on a rug, learning notes and rhythm (“ta, ta, tee-tee, ta”), and singing the song “Dixie.” A few years ago, I was certified in the Kodály method of music teaching (lots of ta’s and tee-tee’s), and those first music classes were always on my mind.

 

I loved learning the mallet instruments for our 4th grade Greek Play and recorder for the 5th grade Medieval Fair, and I remember looking up to the “theatre gang” high schoolers like they were gods. When we were seniors, my friend Courtney Friedlander ’90 [now Doyle] and I asked if we could do the musical The Boyfriend (they said yes!) because we loved it as 4th graders. It was amazing to have that continuity at Parker—to grow up to “be” the people you admired.

 

Besides playing Peter Pan in the 8th grade play (a highlight of my life!) and Hortense the maid in The Boyfriend, and getting to “Sing for [my] Supper” in The Boys from Syracuse, I had so much fun learning the songs and choreography as a chorus member in Fiddler on the Roof and Grease. We felt like a club, coming in on Saturday mornings, sharing donuts before rehearsal, always so supported and energized by teachers Paul Druzinsky, Sunnie Hikawa…

 

In 9th grade, my friend Sabina McBride ’90 and I wrote a musical called The Comet, which we produced for a Morning Ex. I have the videotape of it right here! The set was basically a comet made out of wood and tin foil on a pole. After I shifted to a more contemporary classical direction musically at Oberlin, memories of The Comet and Parker musicals brought me back to wanting to write theatre and get my master’s at NYU.

 

Special Chorus and Grape Jam were fundamental for me. I ended up music-directing an a cappella group at Oberlin, and my choral writing stems from what I learned from Bart and Sunnie in those groups. I did a senior independent study in music composition, and Lucius Bell was such a great advisor. He brought so much positivity to the project, taking me around to recording and computer music studios in Chicago. I really felt taken seriously as a composer, which gave me a lot of confidence to move forward.

 

Sunnie and I chatted on the phone recently—I needed some tips for a musical-theatre-in-English class I was teaching here in Padua, and she was kind enough to share her wisdom. I’m so grateful for the strong connections I made with her and many other teachers at Parker, and my Parker friends are still my closest friends.

 

I think about Parker practically every day. I’m always telling Giordano about the creative projects and performances we did each year. He’s in 2nd grade, so we’ve been talking about Japan studies in Mrs. Briar’s class—we made our own wooden clogs! And the 3rd grade model we built of Chicago made an impression on me. We brought it outside and set it on fire to see which housing materials (brick, wood, etc.) burned in the Great Chicago Fire.

 

Giordano loves science, so classes with Mrs. Fries are on my mind (I also heard she is retiring—congratulations, Mrs. Fries!). She made me want to be a scientist when I grew up, and for the 5th grade Dubbing Ceremony I called myself “Amy the Alchemist.” My painted tile was dedicated to her, when she was having her baby. It said “Happy Baby!”

 

One of my most special science memories is when we adopted trees with a partner. My friend Mia Segal ’90 and I would check up on our tree and write little reports. I felt so mature at the time, but my friend Becca Waugh ’90 just sent me a photo from her old science folder of her and her partner Katerina Christopoulos ’90 next to their tree (the famous weeping willow)—we were only in 2nd grade!

 

In 6th grade the whole class got to sleep in the hallway by the metal horse for Voyageur Night. My Dad came and played voyageur songs on guitar for us. That same year we also made time capsules and came to school dressed like we were in the year 2000, the future! I wore a red and black striped mini-dress and orange plastic sunglasses my Mom had.

 

I have great memories of Art & Shop (we made our own lamps) and, as we got older, pottery, screen-printing (I did a print of a melting clothes iron) and photography. Taking photos with our pinhole cameras made out of oatmeal boxes is clear as day. We had to hold still in our poses for 10 long seconds!

 

 

In 2007 I was asked by an Italian songwriter, Debora Petrina, to come to Padua to do a co-bill with her in the Segnali all'Orizzonte festival. While I was deciding, a friend gave me a plastic ring for my birthday with a card that said, “I see you in Italy. Let your soul sing,” and in that moment I decided to take the trip.

 

The festival was held in a bastion of Padua’s old walls. Claudio, a friend of Debora’s, showed me around, excited by the idea that the walls were there before one brick even existed in New York. Later, at a table with friends, he took pity on me because I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying (I could only say “spaghetti” in Italian at that point) and tried speaking with the little English he knew.