Conference Artist: Richard Kogan

Richard Kogan photo

Richard Kogan has a distinguished career both as a concert pianist and as a psychiatrist. He has been praised for his "eloquent, compelling, and exquisite playing" by the New York Times and the Boston Globe wrote that "Kogan has somehow managed to excel at the world's two most demanding professions." He has gained international renown for his groundbreaking work on the connections between music and healing and on the influence of medical and psychiatric illnesses on the creative output of composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, and Leonard Bernstein. His DVD entitled Music and the Mind: The Life and Works of Robert Schumann was recently released by the Yamaha Corporation. Dr. Kogan is a first-prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild Award and the Chopin Competition of the Kosciuszko Foundation, and he was a recipient of the 2005 Artsgenesis Creative Achievement Award. He is a frequent chamber music collaborator with cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Dr. Kogan is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music and of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. He completed his psychiatry residency training at NYU. He currently has a private practice of psychiatry in New York City and is affiliated with the Weill-Cornell Medical School as Director of its Human Sexuality Program.

Music and the Mind : George Gershwin

What are the essential factors in the development of creative genius? Concert pianist and distinguished psychiatrist Dr. Richard Kogan will explore this question through an examination of the life and works of George Gershwin (1898-1937), one of the greatest and most beloved composers in American history. Among the more remarkable facets of Gershwin's creative genius was his ability to extract music out of what others would consider mere noise (listening to the honking of Parisian taxi horns inspired him to write "An American in Paris") and his ability to fuse the previously distinct classical, jazz, and Broadway show tune traditions.

Dr. Kogan will perform "Rhapsody in Blue", Earl Wild's piano transcription of "Porgy and Bess" and other musical examples in order to illustrate the connections between Gershwin's psyche and his musical output. Particular attention will be focused on aspects of the story relevant to Gershwin's mental health, including his chronic hyperactivity and his unrestrained narcissism and his depressive episode that was treated by a psychoanalyst who missed the clues that Gershwin was suffering from the brain tumor that would eventually kill him. Dr. Kogan will demonstrate the extraordinary healing potential of music by showing how exposure to music transformed Gershwin's life as a troubled youngster.