Haim Alexander

Haim Alexander, born Heinz Alexander in Berlin in 1915, was an Israeli composer of German origin whose career illustrates the process of forging a national music in Palestine during the interwar period. His training at the Stern Conservatory was cut short in 1936 by Nazi persecution, and that same year he emigrated to Palestine.

In his new country he studied composition with Wolpe and piano with Irma Wolpe-Schoenberg and Ilona Vince-Kraus. While still a student, he earned his living as a jazz pianist in cafés in Jerusalem, where he built a reputation as an excellent improviser. From 1945 until his retirement he taught at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem, teaching piano, harpsichord, theory, composition and improvisation. He also gave lectures in musicology at Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University, the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute in Geneva and New York University.

His work reflects the tension felt by many composers who arrived from Europe in the 1930s: on the one hand, the ideological pressure to create a national style with Oriental and folk orientation; on the other, the desire to keep abreast of Western music. Thus, Variations (1947) moves within a post-Romantic chromaticism, while Six Israeli Dances (1949–51) draws on folklore. Over time he incorporated dodecaphony and other serial techniques, following his studies at the Darmstadt courses in the 1950s, and his later output is characterised by a deliberate pluralism that adapts the language to context and expression.

Alexander received several national prizes, among them the Engel Prize (1956), the Artur Rubinstein Prize (1973) and the ACUM Golden Feather Award (1996) for his body of work as a whole. His legacy lies in the integration of Central European heritage with music of Hebrew and Oriental inspiration in Israeli musical life.