See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231788238 Fifty years of electronic music in Israel Article in Organised Sound · August 2005 DOI: 10.1017/S1355771805000798 CITATIONS READS 3 154 1 author: Robert J. Gluck University at Albany, The State University of New York 16 PUBLICATIONS 28 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Morton Subotnick and the late 1960s Downtown Scene View project An International perspective on electroacoustic music history View project All content following this page was uploaded by Robert J. Gluck on 20 September 2014. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Fifty years of electronic music in Israel ROBERT J. GLUCK University at Albany, PAC 312, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, New York 12208, USA E-mail: [email protected] The history of electronic music composition, technologies and founding figure of electronic music in Israel. Born in institutions is traced from the founding of the State of Israel present-day Poland, Tal studied during his teen years in 1948. Core developments are followed beginning with at the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule fur Music the founding generation including Joseph Tal, Tzvi Avni and in Berlin. Among his teachers was Paul Hindemith Yizhak Sadai, continuing with the second and third who, he recalls, ‘pointed me in the direction of elec- generations of musicians and researchers, living in Israel and the United States. The institutional and political dynamics of tronic music’ (Tal 2003), specifically to the studio of the field in this country are explored, with a focus on the engineer Friedrich Trautwein, best known as inventor challenges of building an audience and institutional support, of the Trautonium, a synthesizer prototype created in as well as prospects for the future. 1928. Tal was one of a handful of students at the lab who ‘learned electronics theory, to create, measure 1. INTRODUCTION and do experiments . creating sounds, but not yet music, using electronic tools (vacuum tubes)’ (Tal For a small country, Israel’s electronic musical heri- 2003). Tal never worked directly with Trautwein, but tage is historically long and musically diverse. This should not be surprising given Israel’s identity as a he was involved in the life of Trautwein’s studio during magnet for Jews from many cultures and geographic the period when the Trautonium was coming to frui- locations. The heritage of electronic music in Israel is tion. The studio was equipped with sound generators, as old as the State itself. Israeli independence in 1948 wire recorders and other devices and its goal was the coincided with Pierre Schaeffer’s initial experiments, emulation of acoustical instrument sounds. in Paris, with musique concrète. This emerging body of Tal arrived in Israel in 1934. He did not continue his work made its way to Israel within a decade, when it involvement with electronic music until the late 1940s. was first publicly presented on Israeli radio. Ironically, As he notes, ‘We didn’t have access to electronic Israel’s first electronic music pioneer, Joseph Tal, was instruments to produce sounds and there was no among those who experimented, in Germany in the [perceived] need for them by the public’ (Tal 2003). Tal 1920s, with the use of electricity to generate sounds. became active as a composer and teacher of composi- The pre-State period and the pre-history of electronic tion and piano at the Jerusalem Academy of Music, music are thus linked as well. at its founding in 1936. It was renamed the Israel Since electronic music first developed internation- Academy of Music and Dance in 1948, when Tal ally as an expansion of European and, subsequently, became its director. He remained there through 1952. American musical ideas and vocabulary, it is not Tal’s early compositional style was a point of some surprising that the first Israeli works in this medium controversy, due to his departure from – and criticism would also reflect movements in those locales. Impor- of – the so-called ‘Mediterranean school’ favoured by tant influences included the Parisian musique concrète many Israeli composers at the time. This was an of Pierre Schaeffer and its integration, pioneered approach pioneered by Paul Ben Haim and other by Edgard Varèse, with the German approach to composers, who set traditional Middle Eastern Jewish electronically generated sounds. New possibilities melodies within a European, often Impressionist, were opened up when Joseph Tal toured the studios of harmonic vocabulary. For this reason, Tal observes Europe and New York, Tzvi Avni encountered the that he was viewed as an ‘enfant terrible’. Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New Tal remained rooted in European music, at times York, and Yizhak Sadai visited Schaeffer’s GRM composing using dodecaphonic techniques. Over the studio. The reception at home was, however, less than course of his career, his works have included music welcoming and accepting. for choir and orchestra, ballet and opera (often on biblical themes), music for solo instruments including 2. JOSEPH TAL (1910–) piano, harp, woodwinds, strings and brass, music for Composer and educator Josef Tal, née Joseph orchesra, percussion ensemble, accompanied voice Gruenthal, is universally acknowledged as the and other instruments, chamber music and music on Organised Sound 10(2): 163–180 © 2005 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771805000798 164 Robert J. Gluck electronic tape. His eclectic music has been described musicians set the groundwork for greater openness to as ‘broad dramatic gestures and driving bursts of electronic and new music. Fellow composer Tzvi Avni energy generated, for example, by various types of (2003: 1) considers Tal’s best-known works to be his ostinato or sustained textural accumulations . .’ two concertos for piano and tape, a harp concerto, and (Ringer 1980). the opera Masada for tape and singers. He has been awarded many prizes at home and abroad, including 2.1. Tal returns to electronic music the Israel Prize (1971), Arts Prize of the City of Berlin (Germany, 1975), Johann Wenzel Stamitz Prize Tal re-engaged with electronic music after visiting (Germany, 1991), and others. Europe, shortly after World War II: With respect to his identity as an Israel composer, I received a UNESCO fellowship for research in elec- Tal observes: tronic music and I travelled to the studios cross Europe . I don’t think that a national expression ends with a and America and I learned what there was to learn. When quotation of old music. There are national elements and I returned home, I brought with me a tape recorder, there is the behaviour in the street, how the people which was a source of great interest and excitement to behave. What’s their morality? What is their degree of people. Slowly I hired engineers interested in the field to aggression? And so on. And this is a nationality. This conduct experiments in creating sounds. should come out in the music, you see, because I live it Through his efforts, the Israel Center for Electronic and I’m confronted with it day by day. If you start Music at the Hebrew University was founded. A work now to translate those things, then already you are on the borderline between language and music, common of Tal’s, an oratorio with electronic tape, became the language and music language. Because to speak about first electronic work to be broadcast on Israeli radio, music in itself is principally an impossibility . if I most likely in 1959 (Avitsur 2003). One of his former wouldn’t have decided to go to Palestine in the early students, composer Reinhard Flender recalls Tal’s 1930s or would have gone to London or new York, I thinking about the nature of electronic music: don’t think I would have written the same music . there To Josef the sound produced by a Moog synthesizer was would be the same elements of twelve-tone music in it, or absolutely equal to the quality of a traditional instrument electronic music, or any other thing . my environment (e.g. Violin or Cello). He was very philosophical in is not only Israeli, my environment is absolutely interna- his approach to electronic music. It was somehow clear tional . So I am a member of the whole world, but I am to him that it [electronically generated sound] was the living in a certain country, which is called Israel and very highest level of sound production because it had over- near to all that interests us – our fight in life, our struggle come all limits of a traditional instrument in terms of in life. And this certainly comes out in the music, no speed, colour, pitch, etc. He contradicted with all the matter if it is written for piano or for electronics, or for authority he had my theory that a sound produced by a whatever you want. (Tal 2003) musician was fundamentally different from a sound Tal continues to consider issues about electronic produced by the turning of the button of a synthesizer. music. Among his interests is effective and replicable For him the production of electronic music was in no scoring of electronic music, work that has been pre- way different from playing the piano. The only difference sented at the 1988 and 1992 International Computer for him was that in electronic music the composer is united with the performer. It is a way of direct com- Music Conferences (Shimony, Markel and Tal 1988; munication between composer and audience without Shimony, Gerner, Markel and Tal 1992). He recently the intermediary state of notation and interpretation published an extended essay, ‘Musica Nova in the of the written score.