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Tzvi Avni is an Israeli composer and founder of the Electronic Music Studio at the Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem. Born in Germany, Avni has studied at the Tel-Aviv Academy, Tanglewood Music Center (with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss), at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart, Germany, and with Iannis Xenakis in Paris. He is a prolific composer of many works for instrumental and vocal ensembles, solo instruments, and electronic tape. Avni has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize and the Israel Prize.
This text is based on conversations with Tzvi Avni that took place on September 14, 2006, and via correspondence that took place between July 2003 and December 2004.
Arrival in the United States
I first came to America at the end of 1962. I didn't really know what I was going to do there, but I did know that I wanted to find a way to learn about what was going on in the world. After World War II, the Israeli War of Independence and the difficult economic situation in the years that followed, we in Israel were cut off from the rest of the world. In the early 1960s, Israelis of my generation were eager to seek ways to find out.
Once I arrived in New York, somebody arranged for me a meeting with Edgard Varèse. He asked me: "What can I do for you?" He listened to a few tapes of my work and he said "It's very good. You are a composer. Do you want to learn my tricks? Go find your own tricks! Go to Columbia University." Varèse then spoke with Luening, who met with me, listened to a few of my compositions, spoke with Ussachevsky and enrolled me in the course of study at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. During that year, I also spent a month working with Myron Schaeffer at the University of Toronto, on a scholarship from the Canada-Israel Foundation.
At the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
Vladimir Ussachevsky was our teacher. We didn't see much of Otto Luening. Mario Davidovsky was already quite a dominant figure and already a veteran. The technical instruction, though, was done by Andrés Lewin-Richter. The students that year, 1963-1964, included Walter Carlos, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Charles Wuorinen and Harvey Sollberger. We met once or twice a week for a couple of hours. We would analyze pieces and speak about them. Then Davidovsky and Lewin-Richter would teach us the how-tos. Individual work was with Lewin-Richter. Later, at the end of my time at Columbia-Princeton, when I was finishing my work 'Vocalise', they gave me the keys and I would stay on my own all night-long.
Ussachevsky was a very kind and nice person. He was of course one of the pioneers in the field and when I was with him, he was already summing up his life's work. He was much more into concrète sounds than electronic sources, even though he was the one who developed the RCA synthesizer lab. He was a founder of the basic language using splicing and the other tape techniques. He was also a more conservative musician than the students, such as Mario Davidovsky and Charles Wuorinen, who were very much into serialism and other approaches.
Mario Davidovsky was a very bright person and a gifted musician, one with very definite opinions about what is right and wrong in music. Structure and accuracy are very important for him. Not a fan of loops, he thought very carefully about sounds, how they were worked out and placed in a piece.
On 'Vocalise', composed at Columbia-Princeton
I remember hearing the sounds of the subway and this gave me the idea for the first sound in 'Vocalise'. This was the period following President Kennedy's assassination, quite a tense time in the world, a time of international concern. I think that the general atmosphere goes into everything people do, quite aside from compositional technique, such as splicing and mixing.
Vocalise was principally a sonata. It has two themes, the voice and the electronic sounds. After they are introduced, they go through a series of variations and at the end, there is a brief reprise. I didn't speak of the work as a sonata at the time because it was too conventional a category. But times change. In the development, the middle section, the material gets very tense. All of the sounds build up and reach a climax, almost like an explosion. I didn't mean to imitate the sounds of an explosion; but I wanted a build up of something that was very tense. I had recently read George Orwell's novel, 1984 and was thinking about some of the forces and trends that were affecting modern society negatively.
Return to Israel
I think that my experience with electronic music changed much about my approach to musical thinking and it remains with me even today. I became involved in more abstract ways of thinking about sound, not only as a component of harmony or melody, but as something with its own meaning. And of course, my mind became changed about noise, its qualities and possibilities. While we in Israel were influenced by Impressionism, I learned about a new way of approaching texture in New York and I encountered new, less linear, ways of looking at development. My earlier works were generally in classical forms, such as rondo and sonata. What I learned about electronic music influenced my later works and not just those with electronics.
This period in New York City was a very fascinating period for me. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez were there. Everyone came to the Hunter College concert series. When I was at Tanglewood during the Summer of 1963, Aaron Copland said to me: "When you get back to Israel, it will take you a while to return to yourself from the confusion of your time here."
When it came time for me to put together a studio at the Jerusalem Academy, the model in my mind was Columbia-Princeton. I gave a weekly lecture with examples from works, which we would analyze. We would listen to music of different types. We also had a technician who worked with the students. It was the most logical approach to take: to work with the students more theoretically and then give them a chance to try and create a piece. They had to do this at the end of each course.
When I was the head of the theory and composition department, I set a policy that every student at the Academy had to take the electronic music course. Some were less enthusiastic than others, but students created all sorts of pieces, some of them even funny. I believe that students should have the experience of composing all types of music, including twelve-tone, and gain some degree of understanding of every aspect of musical expression.
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