Josef Tal – In Memoriam

Josef Tal, the last representative of the Founding Fathers generation of Israeli art music, died in Jerusalem on 25 August 2008.

Josef Tal was born Joseph Grünthal on 18 September 1910 in Pinne (now Poland). His family moved to Berlin in 1911. From 1927 to 1929, he studied at the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where his teachers included Heinz Tiessen, Max Trapp, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Sachs, Leonid Kreutzer and Max Saal. In 1934, after the Nazis rose to power in Germany, he immigrated to the land of Israel. After a period of adjustment and struggle with absorption difficulties, including a period of residence at two Kibbutzim (Beit Alpha and Gesher), he settled in Jerusalem in 1937, and taught composition and piano at the Jerusalem Academy of Music. He was the director of the Academy from 1948 until 1952. In 1965 he joined the faculty of Hebrew University and eventually became the first head of the musicology department. The many honours bestowed upon him include the State of Israel Prize (1971), Art Prize of the City of Berlin (1975), the Wolff Prize, Israel (1983), Verdienstkreuz I Klasse, Germany (1984), Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France (1985), Johann Wenzel Stamitz Prize, Germany (1995), and others.

Many of Tal’s works were inspired by Biblical texts or epic events in Jewish history. This includes several of his operas – from the small-scale Saul at Ein-Dor (1955), setting excerpts from a Biblical text, to his epic opera Ashmedai (1968), whose libretto derives its initial inspiration from a Mishnaic legend. Ashmedai’s libretto was the first in a long series of collaborations between Tal and the Israeli poet Israel Eliraz. Their cooperation included both full-scale operas and shorter dramatic scenes, culminating in Tal’s last opera Josef (1993), inspired in part by Franz Kafka. Tal has also set texts by modern Israeli poets (e.g., Yehuda Amichai) and German-Jewish authors (e.g., Else Lasker-Schüler).

In his musical style, Tal largely remained faithful to his European background in contradistinction to dominant trends in Israeli composition in the 1940s and 1950s, which drew inspiration from the folklore of the various Jewish communities in Israel and from the Eastern musical traditions of the region. Tal did not always ignore these musical sources – his First Symphony (1953), for example, is based in part on a Jewish-Babylonian lament. Yet even then, he found ways of integrating these materials into his own musical style, strongly rooted in his studies of 12-tone writing in Berlin. With the passing years, his use of the dodecaphonic elements became less and less constrained. In his later writings, he spoke of late twentieth-century music as “pre-classics of 21st-century music” (Reminiscences, Reflections, Summaries, p. 270), a response to “the cataclysm, a severe earthquake shaking traditional music culture brought about by atonality, dodecaphony and electronic music” (Musica Nova in the Third Millennium, p. 37), all developments in which Tal was intimately involved.

Indeed, Tal was largely responsible for the introduction of electronic music to Israel. This too had its roots in his studies in Berlin (where he was introduced to some of the earliest experiments in Friedrich Trautwein’s Studio for Electronic Music). He resumed his studies of electronic music in the 1950s, with the aid of a UNESCO grant, and in 1961 he founded the first studio for electronic music in Israel. While his repertoire includes few purely-electronic works, he has written a number of works which combine electronic and conventional media—including several concerti (for harpsichord, harp and piano) and one opera (Massada 967) in which a magnetic tape takes over the role of the orchestra. A detailed account of one of these works—the Concerto No. 6 for piano and magnetic tape—can be found online in an essay by the late pianist Jeffrey Burns, “With Josef Tal on Kurfürstendamm” (http://imi.org.il/site/presents/burn.htm), which discusses the concerto alongside several of Tal’s works for solo piano. Tal has also taken pride in eliciting “electronic” sonorities from conventional instruments (for example, in his Third Symphony, 1978).

Tal’s work on electronic music extended beyond his actual compositions: he sought to create a system of notation for electronic music (in co-operation with Dr. Shlomo Markel of the Israel Institute of Technology), which he named the Talmark notation. He explained the practical and philosophical background of this system in his Musica Nova in the Third Millennium (published in English and German by the Israel Music Institute, 2003), which also includes Markel’s “brief and condensed introduction into the basic principles” of this notation. According to Tal, the Talmark notation aims to preserve electronic music in a durable, readable format. This makes it possible to transfer this music between locations, analyse it, and even, in time, to “produce a second edition [of an electronic work] in which this or that detail is emphasized” (Musica Nova in the Third Millennium, p. 49) – a process equivalent to the performer’s interpretation of the notation in ‘conventional’ music.

Tal’s varied and profound musical legacy continues to attract attention world-wide; recently, a complete cycle of his symphonies was released on the German label cpo, winning critical acclaim (a discography of Tal’s music is available on http://snipurl.com/taldisc). In addition to Musica Nova in the Third Millennium and several articles in various languages, he has published three autobiographies:

1. Der Sohn des Rabbiners: Ein Weg von Berlin nach Jerusalem (Berlin: Quadriga Verlag, 1985);
2. Reminiscences, Reflection, Summaries (Retold in Hebrew by Ada Brodsky)  (Jerusalem: Carmel, 1997);
3. Tonspur: Auf der Suche nach dem Klang des Lebens – Autobiografie (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2005).
Josef Tal’s music has been published by the Israel Music Institute (IMI).

May his memory be blessed.

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