Yardena Alotin

Yardena Alotin was born in Tel Aviv, the only daughter of Dr. Aryeh and Dr. Hanna Alotin. At the age of five, she began studying piano with Rivka Sharett-Hoz, Moshe Sharett’s sister and Dov Sharett’s wife. As a child, she composed a song by Anda Amir-Pinkerfeld, “The Doll Got Cold,” which she included years later in the Eight Children’s Songs cycle. On her last day at Hadash High School, she participated in a conversation with the poet Leah Goldberg, who greatly influenced her and led her to compose one of Goldberg’s Songs of the River. At the age of 18, she began studying music theory, but was forced to discontinue her studies to serve in the IDF. After the establishment of the state, she studied at the State School for Music Educators, where she studied harmony and counterpoint with Mordecai Seter and orchestration with Paul Ben-Haim. In 1952, she won the Nissim Nisimov Prize for musical compositions.

She later studied music theory with Alexander Uriyah Boskovich at the Tel Aviv Academy of Music and was also a private student of Oedeon Partos. From 1975 to 1977, Alotin was the house composer at Bar-Ilan University.

In her musical writing, she used Western and Eastern traditions and Jewish folklore alongside modern ideas, in accordance with the ideals she received from her music teachers. Her works are generally based on baroque and classical forms. In the work Yefei Nof (1952) for choir, there is a noticeable acapella Influence of Biblical Flavors. The premiere ofYefei Nof by the Rinat Choir was at an international choral festival in Paris. The piano passacaglia is based on a Bukhari poem in an expanded tonality, and the influence of biblical hymns is evident in the cantata from 1956 and the Sonata for violin and piano from 1960. Most of her work is imbued with optimism, natural lyricism, and a tendency toward drama, and these are also not absent in her workThe Painful Exile, which identifies with the Jews of the Soviet Union. Along with frequent use of polyphonic textures, Alotin also applied heterophony in works that combine voices and instruments, such as in Festive Song from 1984, commissioned by the Tel Aviv Foundation for Literature and the Arts to mark the city’s 75th anniversary.

An early work by Alotin, Songs of the River from a cycle of poems by Leah Goldberg, is one of her most performed works.

Yardena Alotin died in New York, 1994.