Ellis Kohs

Ellis Kohs was an American composer and teacher born in Chicago in 1916 and died in Los Angeles in 2000. His career unfolded on the West Coast and within the American academic world, and he is remembered both for his music and for his work as a teacher and administrator.

His training was peripatetic: he studied at the San Francisco Conservatory, at the University of Chicago, where he obtained his master's degree in 1938, and at the Juilliard School with Wagenaar. Between 1939 and 1941 he completed his studies at Harvard University with Piston, Apel and Leichtentritt. After serving as a bandmaster in the United States Army Air Forces, he embarked on a teaching career that took him to the Kansas City Conservatory, Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the College of the Pacific, Stanford and, from 1950, the University of Southern California, where he headed the theory department until 1973 and served as a professor of music.

Alongside teaching, he held administrative posts and published numerous articles. His textbook Music Theory, from 1961, enjoyed wide circulation and was followed by Musical Form (1976) and Musical Composition (1980). As a composer he is noted for an imaginative use of the technique of variation; in his later works he incorporated more recent procedures, such as twelve-tone serialism, without abandoning established forms or the resources of melodic and rhythmic unity. His honours included the Alice M. Ditson Award (1946) and the BMI publication prize (1948), as well as commissions from Monteux for his Symphony No. 1 and from the Fromm Foundation for the Symphony No. 2.

His works include the opera Amerika, based on Kafka, symphonies, concertos for cello and violin, the Psalm xxiii and numerous chamber and keyboard pieces. His legacy lies chiefly in the combination of a modern idiom with fidelity to classical form, and in his influence as a teacher.