Yehuda Yannay
Yehuda Yannay, born in 1937 in Timișoara, Romania, was an Israeli American composer, conductor, and media artist. Surviving the Holocaust times and fleeing the subsequent Communist regime, he immigrated with his parents to Israel in 1951.
Yannay was a prolific and versatile composer and media artist of international reputation whose list of about 130 works include: music for orchestra, electronic, live electronic and synthesizer pieces, environmental compositions, film, music-theater, and a large body of vocal and chamber music pieces. He represented Israel at the ISCM festival of 1968 in Hamburg and the Gaudeamus Festival in Holland. Considered an international figure in contemporary music, Yannay’s contributions to new ideas in 20th-century music are listed in numerous articles, textbooks and encyclopedias of music.
He studied composition in Israel with Alexander Uriyah Boskovich and graduated from the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv in 1964. Before graduation he received the first Fulbright grant in music from Israel. He chose to attend Brandeis University where he was awarded an MFA (1966). After a fellowship at the famed Tanglewood composition seminar in 1965, he returned to Israel as a part-time dean at the Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv. In 1968 he was invited as a doctoral student to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana where he participated in the lively avant-garde activities in the late sixties and obtained a doctorate in 1974.
He received numerous commissions and grants from prominent performing groups, soloists and foundations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Milwaukee Symphony, The Orchestra of Our Time, Israel Composers Fund, Wisconsin Arts Board, Anna Nassif Dance Co., Festival Musica Nova in Santos, Brazil, and others. Yannay had major premieres with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, The Innova, Electronic Music Foundation, Vienna Modern Masters and Albany labels issued five CDs with his works. He toured extensively as composer, lecturer and conductor in Western and Eastern Europe, Brazil and Israel.
Yehuda Yanay has passed away in 2023.