Joel Spiegelman (January 23, 1933 – November 13, 2023) was an American composer, conductor, concert pianist, harpsichordist, recording artist, arranger, author and professor.
Besides the influence his mother had on his development, at the age of 10, he was totally enthralled by Vladimir Horowitz's performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony on an old RCA recording.
He then went to his mother and said “I want to do that too.” Joel Spiegelman gave his first concert at the age of 4 years old when he performed on the NBC affiliate radio station in Buffalo, NY.
He made his official national debut at 13 years old in 1946 when he received wide attention with a review in Musical America for a performance as piano soloist with the Buffalo Philharmonic.
In 1954, he was accepted into the newly formed graduate school at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in musical composition in 1956.
That same year, he also made his debut as a piano soloist performing the solo keyboard part of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.
In September 1965 he left for Moscow to do research on 18th century Russian keyboard music and the new post-WWII contemporary Soviet composers such as Andrei Volkonsky, Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Valentin Silvestrov, Leonid Grabovsky, Sergei Slonimsky, Andrei Petrov, Rodion Shchedrin and others.
A recording was made of this transcription on the Kurzweill 250 Keyboard and released by East-West Records (a Time-Warner company) in 1988 as “New Age Bach” His teaching career spanned a thirty year period (1961-1991) during which he taught at Brandeis University, The University of California, San Diego (Regents Professor) and Sarah Lawrence College.
Joel Spiegelman was legally married four times with one long-term common law partnership with artist Trudi Vogel.