Jeff Cohan brings three flutes with him to the Victrola Coffee Roasters on Capitol Hill. All of them are wood and modeled off flutes from the 1550s to the 1700s. Two are placed lovingly in worn satchels. Cohan slides one—a Renaissance flute—out of a PVC pipe. Often the TSA inspects this PVC pipe because they suspect he is hiding contraband in there. He isn’t. It’s just the flute.
Cohan, whose hair is white and wild, pours his to-go cup of green tea into a delicate Japanese cup he has stashed on his person. “I bring this everywhere,” he says. A baroque bassoonist gave it to him. Sensing a good anecdote, I reach for my phone to start recording. Tell me about this cup.
He mentions the bassoonist again. “There’s great demand for baroque bassoon,” Cohan says. “I would say it’s the civilized bassoon.” We never make it back to the cup. Instead he launches into a lesson about the difference between baroque and modern instruments.
This is Cohan’s world. He specializes in old flutes and antiquated music. Each year, he organizes a series of monthly concerts at the Faith Lutheran Church at which he performs period instrument chamber music with a rotating cast of musicians. They unearth a world long-forgotten by most of society.
Baroque instruments are simpler than modern ones, but harder to play. In the flute’s case, the baroque version is a wood tube with six holes and one key. By comparison, the modern flute is metal and has 16 holes and a system of keys that makes chromatic play easier. To achieve the same range, baroque flutists do intricate cross-fingerings. Cohan says it gives him a “much more intimate relationship with the instrument.” The sound is softer and warmer and “more colorful” than the modern flute, which has a certain “stridentness” to it, Cohan explains, emphasizing the word by driving his arm forward, cutting it through the air.
That instrument evolution came about when the world got louder. In the mid-18th century, steam engines, machines, and people living in cities created cacophonies like never before. This Industrial Revolution bore a newfangled concept: a middle class with disposable income to spend on things like live music. This created big concerts. The instruments needed to be able to compete. Before then, music was mostly for aristocrats. The concerts were small, intimate. That’s what Cohan is attempting to bring to audiences now—except the shows are donation-only. Perhaps our disconnected, distracted, high-tech society is ready to come full circle. Maybe we are in need of the baroque flute.
Cohan, 75, has played the flute his entire life. He first saw it in action in second grade when a flutist performed at his Illinois school. With a dad in the Navy, Cohan moved to Texas in fourth grade. There, in order to supply the football teams with bands, the schools administered a test to students to find musicians. Anyone who passed went to the gymnasium to choose their instrument. With every instrument laid out before him, Cohan chose the flute.
His dad was with him. “My dad said, ‘What, and march with all the girls?’ That almost scared me away,” Cohan remembers. But Cohan stuck with it. The flute became his whole world. “I remember going down the street on my bike,” he says. “I was hearing tunes in my head and playing them on my handlebars.” He twiddles his fingers on imaginary handlebars.
Cohan’s parents separated. He moved back to Illinois and took up lessons with a German flutist. Years later, he learned his teacher was the same flutist who had performed at that second grade assembly all those years ago. When he went to college at the University of Washington, Cohan originally studied marine biology. That didn’t last long. Soon, he sought music. A scholarship he earned to learn the South Indian flute and the Japanese shakuhachi changed his life. “I was able to study these really simple flutes of other nationalities, and I discovered how expressive they were,” Cohan says.
In the 1970s, a grant took him to Paris, where he lived on the Seine in an apartment full of other artists. An American harpsichordist showed Cohan his first baroque flute. Cohan was hooked. Since then, he’s performed around the world and won several awards. He’s also played in hospitals. Like the one run by nuns in Bern, Switzerland. They asked him to perform in the hallways; at lunch, he’d play for the nuns. Playing for the ill and in-need is moving. “That’s a big central issue behind music,” he says, “caring for one another.”
The intimacy of those performances is what he’s striving to recreate in his Seattle series. For his January show, Cohan played “A Little Concert for Louis XIV.” Around 30 years ago, Cohan found a manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In it was all of the music Louis XIV instructed his court to play during his reign. Part of the collection Cohan found included songs “to put the king to sleep, basically,” he says. The collection varies, though. “They’re sometimes very sort of upright and martial music that attracts your attention, and other times they’re very touching and beautiful,” Cohan says.
One of the challenges with baroque music is the guesswork. The notes exist on the page, but there’s no instructions about accentuation; it’s unclear exactly how it was meant to be played. Cohan and his performance partners—a group of often-international players—try to suss this out.
Cohan’s February show featured Olena Zhukova, who is the first result when you type “Ukraine” and “harpsichordist” into Google, Cohan says, and Montreal’s Susie Napper (“I think she’s the goddess of the viola da gamba”) alongside Mélisande Corriveau on treble viol playing French and Italian 17th-century music. On March 19, he’ll play folk songs from the Renaissance and Baroque periods accompanied by lute and guitar. Those songs are the equivalent of the “popular music we have today,” Cohan says, “like the Beatles.”
The challenge of understanding and relaying an artifact like baroque music creates a one-of-a-kind live performance in a world where the answers are often digital and always at our fingertips. “We want to try to find the kernel of truth on the emotional level,” Cohan says, “and make it resonant.”
See Jeffrey Cohan perform with Oleg Timofeyev as part of the Folk Song from Three Centuries III concert on Thursday, March 19, at Faith Lutheran Church.
