Josef Tal - Electronic Music

Electronic Music

The founding figure of the field in Israel, Josef Tal, was first exposed to electronic music in the late 1920s in Germany. The founding of the Israel Center for Electronic Music was the result of a six-month UNESCO research fellowship on which Tal toured major international electronic music studios, in 1958. It was a meeting with Milton Babbitt at The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center that pointed Josef Tal to the technology he needed to found the first electronic music studio in Israel. He learned from Vladimir Ussachevsky, about a new invention by Canadian inventor Hugh Le Caine, called the Multi-track. First built in 1955, this device could replay six independent magnetic tapes, with the speed and direction of each tape separately controllable. Le Caine's idea was to design an instrument to facilitate composition in the Parisian musique concrète tradition of Pierre Schaeffer. Following a successful fund-raising by Shalheveth Freier the Multi-track which was built for Tal's studio was completed and delivered to Jerusalem in 1961. It required a trip by Le Caine to set it up correctly.

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.

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.

Tal was a strong believer in the value of electronic instruments and their potential to transcend the limitations of acoustical means of sound production. Tal regarded electronic music as a new music language, which he describes as unstable and lacking a crystallized definition. He viewed the computer as an instrument which compels the composer to disciplined thinking. In return, it stores the data it was fed with absolute faithfulness. Nevertheless, when the computer is ill-used, the composer's incompetence will be revealed, as he is unable to unite computer with the realm of music. But according to Tal, composing electronic music has another aspect too: when the composer chooses the computer's music-notation as his tool for creating, he concomitantly annuls the performer's role as an interpreter. From that point on, it is only the composer's mental capacity that counts, and the performance is independent of the interpreter's virtuosity.

Tal integrated electronic music in many of his works for "conventional" instruments, and was actually one of the world's pioneers in doing so. His pieces for electronic music and harp, piano or harpsichord, and operas like Massada or Ashmedai are typical examples. Following Concerto No.4 for Piano & Electronics premiere (27/8/1962), Herzl Rosenblum the daily Yediot Ahronot's editor and critic, used the terms "Terror!", "Cacophony" and "Minority dictatorship"...

" Tal's considerable interest in electronic music, and the time and creativity he devoted to it, he composed very few electronic works, and these were not played very often – partly because the composer himself did not particularly encourage their public presentation... Apparently, Tal could not quite adapt himself to the situation of sitting in a hall facing a set of two or four loudspeakers, and listening to the sounds emanating from them with no human performer in sight... Tal's compositional involvement with electronic music therefore largely consisted of combining live performance with electronic sound" —Jehoash Hirshberg

Tal taught electronic music and composed, for nearly two decades. Upon his retirement in 1980, Menachem Zur became director and remained in this role until the University closed the studio, for a variety of reasons, in the 1990s.