Ady Cohen is a film composer who also composes music for the stage, TV and the concert hall, and an Associate Professor of Contemporary Writing and Production and Film Music at Berklee College of Music in Boston. He is the winner of the 2012 ACUM (Israeli ASCAP) Award for Best Score for a Children’s Film (for his score to the successful “Silverfish”), and the 1998 Israeli Academy Award for Best Film Score. The film, "Dangerous Acts", won seven Academy Awards including Best Director.
Having come from a family of musicians (most of them with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra), Ady was naturally drawn into the world of music, and soon enough became very successful at it. On the basis of his early work, the late Maestro Leonard Bernstein became Ady’s patron and sponsored his studies at New York University where he graduated with Honors as a Bachelor of Fine Arts. He proceeded to win numerous international awards and scholarships.
Ady Cohen, age 6, on his pianist mother Ruth Menze's lap, his brother Sharon and his future patron, Maestro Leonard "Lenny" Bernstein
Ady has composed over 50 film scores in Israel, the USA and Europe. He has written the music for numerous theater plays and dance performances, as well as for TV films and series. His talents are also employed by the advertising industry in TV, cinema and radio commercials and jingles.
Legendary musicians, such as Grammy Award winning composer Lalo Schifrin (“Mission: Impossible”), have praised Ady’s music, and some of his illustrious collaborators include distinguished directors such as Academy Award winner Zbigniew Rybczynski (“Tango”) and animator Gil Alkabetz (“Run Lola Run”).
As a composer who specializes in dramatic music, Ady’s unique ability to compose in different musical idioms, combined with his sensitivity to atmosphere and nuance, has led him to work in diverse genres: drama, comedy, action, suspense, thriller, children, teens, narrative as well as experimental films, and last but not least, his favorite: animation. His passion for animation and mastery of this genre has proven to enthuse and move audiences worldwide, as manifested in dozens of millions of YouTube views, accompanied by rapturous, admiring comments, mostly for his Fox International Channels BabyTV music.
His remarkable success in composing music scores for numerous animated films and TV series culminated in his most recent accomplishment, 65 minutes of music for the breath-taking, exciting, energetic and moving epic score he has composed, orchestrated and conducted for the animated feature film “The Legend of King Solomon”, a Hungarian-Israeli co-production.
Thanks to his worldwide reputation as a composer, Ady was recently chosen as one of the final three candidates to become the Chair of Film Scoring at the distinguished Berklee College of Music, following years of working as a lecturer on Film Music and Sound Design at several prestigious colleges and art academies, such as the Screen-Based Media Department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem and the Israeli Animation College, Tel Aviv.
Ady shares his life with Bavat Marom, a world-renowned opera singer, their 2 children Lyle and Noot, and millions of cats.
Lalo Schifrin
Grammy Award winning composer, "Mission: Impossible"
"Your music shows a lot of imagination and skill. I think you are very talented."
Zbigniew Rybczynski
Academy Award winning director, "Tango"
"I want to emphasize Ady's extraordinary talent as a film composer. He has a rare and special gift to give musical expression to visual images. He mastered a very unique art of perfect synchronization between score and visual actions. Films with his music seem to be designed, filmed and edited to a prerecorded music – a real music-picture symbiosis, a dream of every director! Also, his music “works” immediately during the first screening (you don't need to listen 10 times to a CD before you start to like it!). I can only compare Ady's talent and achievements with the mastership of Nino Rota."
Steve Schnur
President, EA Music Group
"Ady is an incredible composer."
Gil Alkabetz
Animation director and professor for animation at the HFF cinema academy, Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany
“I was completely taken by Ady's outstanding musicality and his ultimate mastering of any style needed. His range seems infinite: from classical to musicals, thrillers, romance and actually any genre one could imagine. I would mention one case in which I needed a unique combination of old Hollywood's adventure film music together with a sentimental intimate atmospheric theme, and in addition a kind of experimental oriental sound. All these in a very compressed time frame. Ady solved it very elegantly and by miracle managed to get a unity of style for these very different themes. All this in a completely unique, original and extremely effective way. Actually his musical ideas inspired my own cinematic ideas, and led me to new directions in the script.”
Ronald H. Sadoff
Ph.D., Associate Professor & Director, Dept. of Music and Performing Arts - Scoring for Film and Multimedia, New York University
"You are a marvelous composer with real breadth of expression. The strength of character in your scores and the inventiveness throughout all of your music are fully appreciated."
William Rosar
Editor, "The Journal of Film Music"
"Yours is lovely music, Ady, and provides some hope for the future of film scoring, for one reason, because it gets away from the handful of tiresome and musically uninteresting clichés we are exposed to in virtually every new theatrical film. Your lyricism and humanity shine through!"
Noam Meshulam
Animation director and head of Pitchi Poy Animation Productions
“Ady Cohen, with his great talent, sensitivity, unique style and meticulous precision, re-defined for me the meaning of “a film composer”. He breathed life into our animation creations. With incredible technical mastery he created music on a level we have never experienced before in our productions, bringing our work to a new level altogether.”