Moshe Cotel

Moshe (Morris) Cotel (February 20, 1943 – October 24, 2008) was a pianist and composer whose music was strongly influenced by his Jewish roots. Cotel moved from his Jewish roots to focus on music for most of his life, and received his rabbinic ordination and synagogue pulpit in the years before his death.

Early life and education Morris Cotel was born February 20, 1943, in Baltimore, and was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family.

He earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the Juilliard School in New York City, in 1964 and 1965 respectively. and studied art in Italy for two years.

Career Cotel had been a professor of music composition at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore from 1972, until he retired in 2000.

Compositions His opera Deronda was based on the title character in George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda, a Victorian era English Jew who combines proto-Zionism with Kabbalistic ideas. The Fire and the Mountains is a cantata he wrote that memorializes the Holocaust. The choral piece Trope for Orchestra integrated cantillation used in public readings of the Torah in synagogue. His 1985 two-act opera Dreyfus was based on the trial and conviction of the unjustly accused French officer Alfred Dreyfus and the anti-Semitism it aroused in France. As Cotel described the encounter, "Without knowing it, I had changed this woman’s life, and she had no idea that she had just changed mine".

Dreyfuss, Opera in Two Acts (1980–1983)

Trope for Orchestra- choral work

My Shalom, My Peace (poems by Jewish and Arab children) for Treble Chorus, Harp and Percussion (1980)

The Fire and the Mountains for Chorus, Children's Chorus, Soloists and Percussion.(1977) - cantata

Night of the Murdered Poets- premiered in 1978 with actor Richard Dreyfuss as narrator

Chronicles: A Jewish Life and the Classical Piano-

Chronicles II-

Quatrains (5) for mezzo-soprano & chamber orchestra (1960)-

Piece for Piano Four Paws by Ketzel, for piano-