Claudio Cohén, born in Santo Domingo on 16 July 1955, is a Dominican singer-songwriter, poet and cultural organiser. He has been working for more than fifty years, and he has spent all of them writing the kind of song that was never going to sell.

Where the music came from

He grew up hearing his father play classical piano, his mother sing and his grandmother recite La Hilandera. He started composing at seventeen.

In November 1973 he entered the fourth Amucaba song festival with Poema Inconcluso, arranged by Jorge Taveras, and took third place by a margin of two points. A juror later told him the points had come off because he had left a la-la-la where words should have gone. It was the musical bridge.

What he took from that festival was not the placing. Waiting for him in the corridor of Bellas Artes was René Alfonso, who asked him where on earth he had come from, and who became his teacher.

Nueva Forma

He was brought into Nueva Forma by Víctor Víctor, the group that became one of the emblems of 7 Días con el Pueblo. Sonia Silvestre was in it too. This was the Dominican Republic of Joaquín Balaguer, and singing those songs cost the people who sang them their commercial careers, knowingly.

With Víctor Víctor he set Pablo Neruda’s Versainograma a Santo Domingo to music, the two of them working it out in an armchair in Milagros Ortiz’s house. Joaquín Basanta was the other mentor he names.

He loved singing in a choir, he says, but always felt like a soloist, because the songs he wrote were too unorthodox to hand to anybody else.

Pedro nació con la boca llena de palomas

His first record under his own name came in 1977: Pedro Nació con la Boca Llena de Palomas que Nunca Volaron, a song about the fighting between police and students at the UASD. The painter Cándido Bidó said it was what made him start putting doves into his paintings.

The musicians on that album make it a document of a generation: Luis "Terror" Días, Manuel Tejada, Carlos Fernández, Wellington Valenzuela, Luis Ruiz, Maridalia Hernández and Michel Camilo.

Maridalia Hernández had already made her debut as a singer the year before, in 1976, with a song of his. He also set fragments of Pedro Mir’s Hay un País en el Mundo to music with the photographic collective Jueves 6”8, and appeared on the collective record Neruda, Raíz y Geografía.

Four decades of songs

The seventies were philosophical, ecological and social — one album covering prostitution, respect between the sexes, ecology, detachment in love and a refusal of the insensitive upper class, song by song.

Through the eighties he crossed the country taking musicalised poetry to sports clubs and cultural centres, playing rooms that had nothing to do with the record industry.

The nineties brought him the closest thing he has had to a hit: Aquí Estuvo la Lluvia y Preguntó por Ti, built from the title of a poem by Raynerio López of Tamboril. Couples chose it for their weddings. Huele a Madrugada followed in 1994.

The other trades

He trained as an advertising copywriter in the nineties and wrote campaigns that Dominicans can still sing, the Chiqui-Chiqui for Colgate among them. That took him off the stage for more than a decade without taking him out of the work: he produced Claudio Cohén Capta a Juan Pablo Duarte and A Reforestar, a record of ecological songs for children.

Since 2005 he has produced Peña y Trova con Claudio on CDN Radio. On Thursdays he runs Copa y Copla con Claudio at the Museo Memorial de la Resistencia Dominicana, where young singer-songwriters come to play — a man who was once the young one holding the door for the next ones.

Fifty years

He came back to performing in 2015 with Claudio Unplugged SC1 and Viene el Sol. In 2023 he marked fifty years in the work: a new song, Dime Cosas Bonitas, his first two books, Cada Historia Tiene Su Relato and Cada Historia Tiene Su Poema, and the Punta del Este festival in Uruguay, which he reached by winning the Dominican round with Sin Temor a Ser Yo.

Acroarte gave him its Premio al Mérito in 2012 and the Ministry of Culture honoured him in November 2024. He has described himself as a known artist rather than a popular one, and he wrote the reason down at eighteen, in Poema Inconcluso: a son of multitudes never gathered, an island lost without a sea.