Instructor

Naomi Lewin

Naomi Lewin is the former host of weekday afternoon music on WQXR, and of the podcast Conducting Business. Before that, she was midday host at WGUC in Cincinnati, where she created the award-winning weekly program Classics for Kids, which airs on radio stations across the country. She has produced music programs and arts reports for NPR; intermission features for Metropolitan Opera broadcasts; and podcasts on subjects ranging from the Yale Glee Club, to Tippet Rise Art Center, to the bicentennial of St. George's Choral Society. Südwestrundfunk in Stuttgart recently com ...

Naomi Lewin

Naomi Lewin is the former host of weekday afternoon music on WQXR, and of the podcast Conducting Business. Before that, she was midday host at WGUC in Cincinnati, where she created the award-winning weekly program Classics for Kids, which airs on radio stations across the country. She has produced music programs and arts reports for NPR; intermission features for Metropolitan Opera broadcasts; and podcasts on subjects ranging from the Yale Glee Club, to Tippet Rise Art Center, to the bicentennial of St. George's Choral Society. Südwestrundfunk in Stuttgart recently commissioned her to create a two-hour program – in German – celebrating Itzhak Perlman's 75th birthday. Naomi is also a speaker, emcee, and media coach, and the radio voice of Arizona Opera.

Given her previous lifetime as a singer and actress, Naomi has continued to appear onstage, narrating Peter and the Wolf, Carnival of the Animals, King David, Façade, A Visit from the White Rabbit, and Four Seasons of Italian Futurist Cuisine by Aaron Jay Kernis. She can be seen as J.S. Bach in the Sunday Baroque 30th Anniversary video, and as a spitball-shooting professor in La Folía, from Filmelodic. Naomi has hosted a Classics for Kids Live show around the country, and has given talks on operas from Aida to Zauberflöte.

Naomi was born in Princeton, New Jersey, but received both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale.

This instructor is currently teaching the following classes:

The World of Gustav Mahler

Unsung Heroes of the Opera: Vocal Coaches

Music Critics’ Round-Table

Tales from the Front Stand: Conversations with Orchestra Principals

Aaron Cohen

Aaron Cohen has a varied career centered on music, audio, and media. He is an award-winning radio producer, New York Public Radio’s Director of Programming Operations, and an accomplished musician …

Aaron Cohen

Aaron Cohen has a varied career centered on music, audio, and media. He is an award-winning radio producer, New York Public Radio’s Director of Programming Operations, and an accomplished musician.

Mr. Cohen joined New York Public Radio in 2000 and has fulfilled several different roles within the company since then. From 2000 to 2006, he was a producer at the station. During this time at NYPR, he worked on a wide variety of radio programs, from live call-in shows and concert broadcasts, to pre-produced programs and long-form radio documentaries. He has become especially well known for the latter, and a notable highlight is The Ring & I, a one-hour radio documentary about Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which he co-produced with Jad Abumrad in 2004. The program won more than ten awards, including the National Headliner Grand Prize, and continues to be broadcast around the world to this day. He also produced NYPR’s Clash of the Titans: An Exploration of Verdi & Wagner (2013) and Music is a Holy Art: A Celebration of Richard Strauss (2014).

In 2006, Mr. Cohen joined the Programming Department, where he currently serves as the Director of Programming Operations. In this role, he interacts with all the departments of New York Public Radio and makes sure that everything airs as planned throughout the day and night. He occasionally produces special projects for WQXR.

Additionally, Mr. Cohen has produced numerous programs beyond his work for NYPR. From 2007 to 2012, he produced more than 50 features for the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday afternoon broadcasts. He produced three features for the CBC in 2009 and 2010, focusing on Le Poisson Rouge, Kronos Quartet, and the then-new Robert LePage Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera, respectively. In 2015 and 2016, he produced the WFMT national broadcasts of the Glimmerglass Festival operas (Candide, Macbeth, and Cato in Utica in 2015; The Thieving Magpie, The Crucible, and Sweeney Todd in 2016). In 2017, he produced the WFMT national broadcast of Bellini's Il Pirata from the Caramoor Music Festival. He was a music producer for the American Public Media classical music podcast Decomposed with Jade Simmons in 2019.

Mr. Cohen began his career as a classically trained oboist. As a professional musician, he performed with many orchestras, including a performance at the Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992. He also recorded two solo CDs. His first CD, Oboecentric, was recorded in 1994 and features late Baroque and early Classical sonatas for oboe and continuo. The second CD, Oboisms, features works by 20th Century North American composers for oboe and piano.

Marilyn McCoy

Marilyn L. McCoy is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University (2009-present) and Barnard College (2017-present) …

Marilyn McCoy

Marilyn L. McCoy is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University (2009–present) and Barnard College (2017–present). She has also taught at New England Conservatory of Music, Boston University, Brandeis University, and MIT. She completed her doctorate at the University of Chicago with a dissertation entitled "Gustav Mahler's Path to the New Music: Musical Time and Modernism." Drawing upon evidence found through study of Mahler’s compositional sketches and musical analysis, her research explores the ways in which Mahler evokes a sense of timelessness in his music, a compositional strategy that plays out in various ways across his entire creative oeuvre.

Professor McCoy is much in demand as a concert lecturer and “public musicologist.” In Fall 2019 she organized “Gustav Mahler in New York,” a one-day symposium at Columbia University. Recent speaking engagements in 2019-20 in New York included pre-concert lectures at the Brooklyn Art Song Society, and two scheduled lectures at the Mahler Festival in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall (both ultimately cancelled due to the pandemic). Her podcast, with Aaron Cohen of New York Public Radio, Embrace Everything: The World of Gustav Mahler, debuted in July 2020.

In 2018-19, she gave presentations at the symposium “Leonard Bernstein and Vienna: A Centennial Discussion” (Remarque Institute of New York University); “The Mahler Question: The Moving Sounds Festival” by Argento New Music Project; and the 2018 “Mahler Listening Marathon” sponsored by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. She is especially proud of her long association with the MahlerFest in Boulder, Colorado, where she served as annual pre-concert lecturer and symposium participant from 2002-2016. In February 2012 she gave several lectures at Disney Hall as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Mahler Project,” led by Maestro Gustavo Dudamel. She has also spoken at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, the Bard Festivals “Berg and His World” (2010) and “Mahler and His World (2002), and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (2007-09). She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Gustav Mahler Society of New York.

Though primarily a Mahler specialist, Professor McCoy was Assistant Archivist at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles for the last three years of its existence (1995–98). Her familiarity with Schoenberg’s correspondence resulted in her newly released publication, with Elizabeth L. Keathley, of Schoenberg’s Correspondence with Alma Mahler by Oxford University Press (2019). This volume, an annotated translation of the correspondence between Alma Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, is part of the nine-volume Schoenberg in Words project, edited by Severine Neff and Sabine Feisst. For more information, please visit here.