Yehuda Yannay

Who is Yehuda Yannay?

Yehuda Yannay is an American-Israeli composer, conductor, film maker and performance artist.

Yannay moved from Romania to Israel in 1951, where he studied with Alexander Uriya Boskovitch, who influenced him greatly. After completing his studies at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv, he pursued postgraduate studies in America, enabled by a Fulbright Fellowship. At Brandeis University, he studied with Arthur Berger and Ernst Krenek, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign he studied with Salvatore Martirano, among others. In 1968 he settled permanently in the USA.

Yehuda Yannay retired in 2004 from his position of Professor of Composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. There, he was founder of the Music From Almost Yesterday concert series at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, now celebrating 39 years of new music performances.

A winner of international and national composition awards, Yannay served as guest-professor at the Staatliche Hochschulen für Musik in Stuttgart and Hamburg. Yannay is a prolific and versatile composer, conductor, film maker, and performance artist whose list of more than a 120 works include music for orchestra, electronic, live electronic and synthesizer pieces, environmental compositions, film, music-theater, and a large body of vocal and chamber music pieces. Considered an international figure in contemporary music, his contributions to new ideas in 20th century music are listed in articles, textbooks and encyclopedias of music.