Tzvi Avni

A prominent figure among Israel's composers is TZVI AVNI, author of music in all genres from songs to large-scale orchestral opuses. He is a Professor Emeritus of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. He has won prestigious awards for his musical creations. Born in Saarbrücken, Germany, Tzvi Avni has shared the fate of thousands of Jewish families. In 1935, he emigrated to Palestine. Initially, he played and improvised on the harmonica, mandolin, and recorder practiced in folk music-making in that part of the world. He was a student of composers Paul Ben-Haim, Mordecai Seter, Abel Ehrlich and pianist Frank Peleg at the Tel Aviv Academy of Music, from which he graduated in 1958. In 1962 he continued his studies in the United States and had the chance to study electronic music on the advice of Edgar Varèse in the most active years of the movement under Vladimir Ussachevsky at Columbia University. In the summer of 1963, thanks to a Tanglewood Music Center scholarship, he became a student of Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss. He returned to Israel and from 1971 to 2015 taught theory and composition at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where he has been a professor since 1976. He founded and directs the Electronic Music Studio. In the 1990s he was a visiting professor at Northeastern University and at Queens College, New York. For fifteen years he was editor of Gitit, the journal of the Israeli branch of Jeunesses Musicales, and in 1993 he became chairman of the Israel Jeunesses Musicales. His music follows the avant-garde stylistics of the second half of the 1960s, but his early works are in the so-called "Mediterranean" style with the typical modality and dance rhythms. His later style combines typical Jewish elements with European features. Many of his works are related to the visual arts because of his special connection with contemporary painting. Avni's music has been awarded many prizes.In 1966 his work Meditations on a Drama received the ACUM prize, and was then performed by many orchestras in Israel and abroad. In 1973, Avni was awarded the Tel Aviv Municipality Prize for Holiday Metaphors. His Piano Sonata No. 2 "Epitaph" won the ACUM Prize again in 1981, in 1986 he received the same prize for lifetime achievement, and in 1998 he was awarded the Prime Minister's Creative Prize of Israel. He was awarded the Küstermeier Prize by the Israeli-German Friendship Association in 1990 and the Saarland Culture Prize in 1999. In 2001, Avni was awarded the Israel Prize, the highest honor bestowed on an artist in Israel.