Violinist Beth Bahia Cohen is the recipient of this year’s Generosity Award.

   Beth Bahia Cohen is the recipient of this year’s Generosity Award.  
   Article by Kathleen Spivack

This very small award recognizes people within the literary/artistic community who have supported the creative work of others. Not only is Beth Bahia Cohen the center of Boston’s world music scene, more importantly for this award, she has worked tirelessly in support of poets in this community. With her music, with her artistic talent, she has been incredibly generous to writers and performers of the spoken word. Previous recipients have included Harris Gardner, Steve Glines, Gail Mazur, Nina Alonso Hathaway, Elizabeth Doran, and others. More to come, we hope.

    For all of you who do so much to further the work of other writers, who put your own egos out of the way so that others may have a place, please note that this award, though it singles out a few individuals annually, is symbolic of the spirit of generosity that inhabits our greater Boston writing community. This small award was originally established by Kathleen Spivack and Joseph A. Murray.

    If you would like to participate in recognizing our generosity award recipients, please do so. The funds are running out.

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Beth Bahia Cohen has spent a large part of her career exploring how the violin is played in various cultures. She was trained as a classical violinist and violist in NY, getting her master's degree from Manhattan School of Music, and spent several years performing with numerous symphony, ballet, opera and chamber orchestras in New York and Europe, as well as in Broadway shows and commercial recording studios.

Beth then traveled, studied and performed with masters of the violin and other bowed instruments from Hungary, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and Norway. She plays several Greek lyras, the Turkish bowed tanbur and kabak kemane, the Egyptian rababa, the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, and more. She plays village music from Hungary, Greek music from various regions of Greece, Turkish classical and folk music, and Arabic and Klezmer music. She has been the recipient of many travel and research grants, including the NEA/Artists International grant and the Radcliffe Bunting fellowship. She performs regularly with several groups and as a soloist in The Art of the Bow, which brings together the various bowed instrument traditions as well as her original music, and she teaches workshops and ensembles in universities throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. As an Applied Music faculty member in the Tufts WEFT program, Beth teaches the violin traditions mentioned above, as well as European classical violin and Celtic music.