Yehuda Yannay

Yehuda Yannay (Hebrew: יהודה ינאי)
Born	May 26, 1937
Occupation	composer, conductor, filmmaker and performance artist.
Era	20th Century

Yehuda Yannay (né Ioan-Ivan Illes) was born to Hungarian-speaking Jewish parents on 26 May 1937 in Timișoara, in the Banat region of Romania.

Against all odds he and his immediate family in Timișoara and Budapest survived the Holocaust era.

Yannay studied piano as a child but had no particular interest in music. His childhood interests were in natural sciences. In 1948 the Romanian Communist regime expropriated his parents’ house and small paper-goods factory. The family was allowed to immigrate to Israel in 1951 and had to renounce Romanian citizenship.

In Israel he attended the elite agricultural high school in Pardes-Hanna with a full scholarship and served after graduation in the Israeli Army Military Police as a criminal investigator. After years of hiatus, he resumed sporadic piano lessons and started to compose small piano pieces, albeit without any formal theoretical background.

In 1959 he was accepted as a private pupil by Alexander Uriah Boskovich, who, unlike other composition teachers, introduced him immediately to twentieth-century techniques and influenced him greatly as a composer and, eventually, as a teacher of composition. He was the youngest composer to be published by the Israel Music Institute, the newly established state supported publisher of Israeli composers. After completing his studies in music theory at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv in 1964, he pursued postgraduate studies in America, enabled by a Fulbright Fellowship, the first ever awarded in Israel in musical composition. At Brandeis University (MFA 1966), he studied with Arthur Berger and Ernst Krenek and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (DMA 1974) he studied with Salvatore Martirano among others. Between 1966 and 1968 he was a Dean at the Israel Conservatory of Music, a part-time position from which he was fired after initiating the unionization of its teachers.

After participating in the Six Day War, Yannay returned to the US in 1968 at the invitation of the musicologist Dr. Alexander Ringer to complete a doctorate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 1970 he became part of the music faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He also taught as visiting professor at the University of Texas-Dallas and was a Fulbright professor at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart and Hamburg.

Yehuda Yannay retired in 2004 from his position of Professor of Composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In 1971 while at UW-Milwaukee he founded the Music From Almost Yesterday concert series that has continued uninterrupted for 45 years.

Notes

References

• Blatter, Alfred (1997). Instrumentation/Orchestration. New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0-02-870191-7.
• Cope, David (1976). New Directions in Music (second ed.). Dubuque: W. C. Brown Co. ISBN 0-697-03556-5.
• Kramer, Jonathan D. (1988). The Time of Music. New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0-02-872590-5.
• Levy, Burt J. (2001). "Yannay, Yehuda". In Sadie, S.; Tyrrell, J. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan.
• Lyman, Darryl (1986). Great Jews in Music. Middle Village, NY: J. D. Publishers.
• Randel, Don M. (1978). Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music. Boston: Belknap Press. ISBN 0-674-37471-1.
• Read, Gardner (1976). Contemporary Instrumental Techniques. New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 9780028721002.
• Rubin, Emanuel; Baron, John H. (2006). Music in Jewish History and Culture. Sterling Heights, Michigan: Harmonie Park Press. ISBN 0-89990-133-6.
• Schwartz, Elliott; Godfrey, Daniel (1993). Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials, and Literature. New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 9780028730400.
• Slonimsky, Nicolas, ed. (1978). Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (6th ed.). New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0-02-870240-9.
• Vinton, John, ed. (1974). Dictionary of Contemporary Music. New York: Dutton & Co. ISBN 0-525-09125-4.
• Yannay, Yehuda (1988). "A European Trilogy". Perspectives of New Music 26 (2): 281–99. doi:10.2307/833198.