Josef Tal

[4][5] Rabbi Julius Grünthal was a docent in the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies (Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums), specializing in the philology of ancient languages.

[8] Tal was admitted to the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik[9] in Berlin and studied with Max Trapp (piano and composition), Heinz Tiessen (theory), Max Saal (harp), Curt Sachs (instrumentation), Fritz Flemming [de] (oboe), Georg Schünemann (history of music), Charlotte Pfeffer and Siegfried Borris (ear training), Siegfried Ochs (choir singing), Leonid Kreutzer (piano methodology), and Julius Prüwer (conducting).

Paul Hindemith —his composition and theory teacher— introduced him to Friedrich Trautwein, who directed the electronic music studio in the building cellar.

Nazi anti-Jewish labour laws rendered Tal unemployed and he turned to studying photography with Schule Reimann with the intention of acquiring a profession that would make him eligible for an "immigration certificate" to Mandate Palestine.

Among his many pupils are the composers Ben-Zion Orgad, Robert Starer,[14] Naomi Shemer, Jacob Gilboa, and Yehuda Sharett, conductor Eliahu Inbal, musicologist Michal Smoira-Cohn, cellist Uzi Wiesel, pianists Walter Hautzig, Bracha Eden, and Jonathan Zak, and soprano Hilde Zadek.

Until his sixties Tal appeared as a pianist[15][16] and conductor with various orchestras, but his major contribution to the music world lies in his challenging compositions and his novel use of sonority.

In the 1990s Tal conducted, together with Dr Shlomo Markel,[17][18][19] a research project (Talmark) aimed at the development of a novel musical notation system in cooperation with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Volkswagen Foundation.

It is up to him, whether he loses his way in that universe or whether he explores it.The characteristic features of Tal's music are broad dramatic gestures and driving bursts of energy generated, by various types of ostinato or sustained textural accumulations.

This was an approach pioneered by Paul Ben-Haim and other composers, who set traditional Middle Eastern Jewish melodies within a European, often Impressionist, harmonic vocabulary.

[33][34][35][36][37] Reflections (1950) is neither tonal nor serial, and inhabits a world not unlike Bartok of the third and fourth string quartets, tempered somewhat by a decidedly Stravinskian acidity, along with a Hindemithian contrapuntal propensity.

Cast in three movements, and having a performance time of approximately fifteen minutes, its procedures relate it more to the general neo-classic aesthetic of the late 1930s and 1940s.

But neither his widely played First Symphony (1952) nor his exceedingly well-wrought String Quartet in one movement, nor, for that matter, his subsequent Cello Concerto is in any structural sense dodecaphonically conceived.

While row materials are freely used, the method of composing with twelve tones is nowhere strictly applied, not even in as recent and completely atonal a piece as the Structure for solo harp.

And if the Symphony still features a dance section in accordance with the then prevailing tenets of the Mediterranean School, such sacrifices to popular taste, however subtle, have been conspicuously missing in recent years.

Life begins with the note C (doh) – a "center of gravity"... Tal employs innovative instrumental and orchestral techniques while retaining a predisposition for tradition, especially the Baroque...

...Undoubtedly one can find a wealth of musical motifs in Israeli folklore, but it is the courageous composer that absorbs it for an extra-national goal, to create a universal artwork.

It will lack the origin of every artwork, which, similarly to nature, is super-natural and eternal....Israeli music is not the outcome of tonality or modality, of atonality or dodecaphony, nor of serial technique or electronics.

In every living language the dialect must necessarily undergo changes: so in music too....As a born creator, Tal has thus enjoyed the inestimable advantage of isolation (for which, to pose an extreme case, Beethoven had to pay with his hearing); notwithstanding his straightforward, elemental love for the Jewish national home, he was too inventive a musician to be caught up in nationalist movements or submit to such Judaic or Jewish pressures...

While the European composer, and especially the avant-gardist, has tended to worry about trends, unconfessed fashions... Tal has been evolving his natural post-tonal style in total detachment from Europe's and indeed America's much-publicized secret societies...

The result has been a supra-factional as well as supra-national output which immediately attracts musical listeners who have not themselves been deafened by their theoretical and/or national allegiances...Tal did not underestimate the importance of relationship between composer and listener, and was aware of the difficulties posed by "modern music": ...Theoretically, if you had played to people of the third century the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, possibly they would have listened only to some white noise – because they were not educated to understand or analyse such a lot of different acoustical appearances...Tal's attitude towards his music and his audience was inspired by the uncompromising approach[es] of Beethoven and Arnold Schoenberg, two composers whom Tal particularly admired.

Le Caine's idea was to design an instrument to facilitate composition in the Parisian musique concrète tradition of Pierre Schaeffer.

[10][48] Tal produced some of the earlier examples of electrico-acoustical music, and in this is joined by such as Edgard Varèse, Mario Davidovsky, and Luciano Berio.

[38] As might be expected from a man of his candor, Tal is completely undoctrinaire about electronic music and broaches its problems with the same healthy skepticism that has marked his approach to the twelve-tone method or the issue of a "national" Israeli style.

Thus, he declared: We can make a religion of the purity of the sine-tone, we can use white noise as a counterpart, but we cannot shut our ears to the fact that compared with conventional tone material, as the bearer of sound content, electronic tone material is inherently narrower and more rigid; indeed it has the characteristics of the synthetic...Imbued with the kind of realism found only in the true idealist, Tal is indeed a liberal in a realm of artistic endeavor where extremism often goes on a rampage.

Combining a good deal of modesty with a strong sense of personal value, he impresses even those who find his music rather forbidding and exerts a far more powerful influence on the younger generation than some of his more "successful" colleagues who intoxicate a gullible public with their facile "Mediterranean" orientalism.