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Introduction
Electronic music in Israel grew from European and North American roots, with its pioneers trained in Berlin, Paris and New York. As the field grew, the works of Israeli composers began to reflect a growing diversity of Israeli cultural influences while at the same time reflecting the search for a common Israeli identity.
During the 1960s and 1970s, three pioneering institutional studios were formed and produced a second generation of composers. But beginning in the 1990s, as institutional support began to decline and two of the original studios closed, young composers dispersed abroad. At the same time, a new institutional studio opened at Haifa University in 2000, initiating a new center of Israeli activity.
Many Israeli composers living and working abroad retain strong ties to their homeland, leaving open the possibility of a resurgence of activity in the future. There is also reason to hope that electronic musicians working in more popular forms will create a body of experimental work, bridging the gap between the academic and non-academic musical worlds and providing broader exposure for the field. Nevertheless, when viewed as a whole, music by Israeli composers around the world offers an impressive internationally-based body of work. This is especially true given the small size of the country.
The first studio
Josef Tal, the founding figure of electronic music in Israel, born in Poland in 1910, studied with Paul Hindemith at the Staatliche Akademische Höchschule für Musik in Berlin. It was Hindemith who pointed him in the direction of early electronic music, specifically towards the laboratory of engineer Friedrich Trautwein, well known for his invention in 1928 of the Trautonium. Tal emigrated to Israel in 1934. He taught at and subsequently became the director of the Jerusalem Academy of Music (later renamed Israel Academy of Music), but owing to a lack of equipment and a void of public interest, his interest in electronic music remained unexpressed until much later. In 1958, he received a six-month UNESCO research fellowship with which he toured major international electronic music studios and subsequently founded the Israel Center for Electronic Music at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was the first studio in Israel.
But it was not the first such attempt. Shalhevet Freier, an Israeli nuclear physicist and political figure, was involved in a brief aborted effort in 1957 to open a studio modeled on the WDR studio in Cologne, Germany. Composer Herbert Brün, who had left Israel two years earlier in search of opportunities in Germany, was involved at the start but he was ultimately uninterested in proceeding beyond a meeting in at the Cologne studio with Freier and Gottfried Michael Koenig, a principle composer at the studio. Frier subsequently proved pivotal in helping Tal raise funds for the purchase of equipment when it came time to open the Hebrew University studio.
Many elements of the Israel Center for Electronic Music, for which construction began in 1959, followed the model of the Cologne studio, with its oscillators, filters and tape recorders. However, the instrument that formed the core of the studio emerged from Tal's last stop on his international tour. While in New York City, at the Columbia-Princeton Center for Electronic Music, he learned from Vladimir Ussachevsky about the Multi-Track. The Multi-Track, invented by Canadian engineer Hugh Le Caine in 1955, could replay six magnetic tapes simultaneously with the speed and direction of each tape separately controllable. Le Caine's idea had been to facilitate composition in the Parisian musique concrète tradition. The Multi-Track that Le Caine built for Tal's studio was completed in 1961 and delivered to Jerusalem. Le Caine, in fact, travelled to Jerusalem to install it. Tal taught electronic music and composed in the studio for nearly two decades. When he retired in 1980, Menachem Zur became director and remained in this role until the University closed the studio in the 1990s.
The second studio
The second electronic music studio in Israel was established by Tzvi Avni in 1971 at the Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem. Avni, born in Germany in 1927, began his musical studies in 1935 at the Tel-Aviv (now named Rubin) Academy of Music, shortly after his immigration to Israe. In the early 1960s, Edgard Varèse encouraged Avni to study electronic music, and Avni went to New York City to work at the Columbia-Princeton Center for Electronic Music. He studied with Vladimir Ussachevsky between 1963 and 1964, composing Vocalise, his first electronic work. When Avni returned to Israel, he designed the new Jerusalem studio around an analog synthesizer and two Revox tape recorders, eventually adding a plate reverb unit and additional recorders. Avni retired in 1995, to be succeeded by Menachem Zur.
The third studio
The third electronic music studio in Israel was founded by Yizhak Sadai in 1974 with support from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Tel-Aviv University and by the Tel-Aviv Foundation for Literature and Art. Sadai, born in 1935 in Bulgaria, had immigrated to Israel in 1949. In the early 1960s, he had worked with Pierre Schaeffer, François Bayle, and Guy Reibel at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris and developed a strong affinity for the compositional and theoretical approach of musique concrète.
Sadai's studio in Tel-Aviv included three Studer reel-to-reel tape recorders, a sizable Moog synthesizer, a Revox amplifier, and a pair of JBL loudspeakers. British born engineer Don Goodman served as studio technician from the time of the studio's founding through 2003, offering assistance and technical support to students, and thanks to Goodman's interest in building new devices, the studio's equipment inventory grew to include a vocoder, ring modulators, and a custom mixer. During the 1980s, the studio acquired a Synclavier II programmable digital synthesizer and became the Center for Computer Aided Music.
During the period of the Tel Aviv studio, Sadai organized a series of concerts of electroacoustic music at the auditorium of the Tel-Aviv Museum with the participation of invited composers connected with GRM, including Bayle, Reibel and Bernard Parmegiani. In fact, the late 1960s through the early 1980s was the period of great activity at all of the three academic centers. It was also a time of great activity in new music in general in Israel, due in large part to poet Recha Freier, who had been instrumental in rescuing thousands of young people from the Nazi Holocaust. She championed contemporary and electronic music after immigrating to Israel and helped support new works through the founding of the Israeli Composer Funds in 1958. In 1966, with composer Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, she founded the triennial Testimonium festival and featured newly commissioned works, often with her libretti, that addressed Jewish "historical events and spiritual creations". The festival ran from 1968 through 1984 and included music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Tzvi Avni, Yizhak Sadai, Yehoshua Lakner, Mauricio Kagel, and many others, many of the performances incorporating electronic sounds.
The Tel-Aviv studio was the chief educational center for a second generation of Israeli composers, among them Joseph Dorfman, Yossi Mar-Haim, Raviv Gazit, Amnon Wolman, Betty Olivero, Danny Oppenheim, Jonathan Berger, Kiki Keren-Huss, Rajmil Fischman, Dan Yuhas, Dror Elimelech, and Ron Kolton, all of whom have pursued distinguished musical careers, some in the United States or England, some in Israel. Upon Sadai's retirement, Raviv Gazit, graduate of the Academy, composer of electronic film and theater soundtracks, became director. The studio was closed by the university in 2003.
New studios and research
New studios were formed from the late 1980s. In 1987, American-born composer, educator and saxophonist Stephen Horenstein established the Jerusalem Institute of Contemporary Music, which includes a hyperinstrument workshop, a center for experimentation with electronically expanded acoustical instruments. Horenstein's music integrates traditional Jewish source material, live, interactive electronics, environmental composition, and psychoacoustic experiments in the perception of time.
In 1995, conductor and composer Eitan Avitsur founded the Bar Ilan University Computer Music Laboratory to support the University's Electro-Acoustic Music Program that he had started in 1990.
In 2000, Arik Shapira founded the Haifa University Electronic Music Studio, which quickly became the most active center for electronic music composition in Israel. While the primary function of the Haifa University studio was to support the studies of pop, rock and jazz-oriented music students and art students, a number of electroacoustic composers have emerged, including Avi Elbaz, Uri Pesach, Itsik Mizrachi, Gil Wasserman, Keren Rosenbaum, and Guy Rosenfarb.
Israel also became home base for an increasing number of researchers in areas such as computer music, acoustics and related fields. The Israel Computers and Music Forum (ICMF) was organized in 1994 by Shlomo Dubnov to "conduct multi-disciplinary research in computer science, engineering and acoustics in the field of music; to encourage composers into producing new works of music using new technologies; to promote computer-aided musicological research, and to serve as a means of exchange among those researchers; to establish continuous relationships with the international musical and scientific communities; to promote pedagogic efforts in the field; to promote production of public events that bring to the public eye the results of computers and music activity and the evolution of musical thought."
Acknowledgements and notes
Thanks to Tzvi Avni, Yossi Mar-Haim, Ofer Ben Amots, Joseph Dorfman, Arik Shapira, Amnon Wolman, Eitan Avitsur, Jonathan Berger, Menahem Zur, Dan Yuhas, Kiki Keren-Huss, Guy Rosenfarb, Raviv Gazit, Yizhak Sadai, Gilad Keren, Meir Shashoua, Keren Rosenbaum, Mira Zakai, Anna Immanuel, Don Goodman, Ilan Green, Avi Elbaz, Daniel Oppenheim, Rajmil Fischman, Stephen Horenstein, Gil Weinberg, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Marianne Brun and Anna Immanuel. Special thanks to Shlomo Dubnov and Joel Chadabe.
A more extensive version of this text is published in the journal Organized Sound 10/2 (vol 10 n 2, 2005, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK).
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