Background
Helene Alexander Pollak was born in Breslau, and her family lived in Hamburg and then emigrated to Chile in 1939 to escape the Nazis.
Helene Alexander Pollak was born in Breslau, and her family lived in Hamburg and then emigrated to Chile in 1939 to escape the Nazis.
She studied piano under the Montessori system of music and received a diploma in 1942 for teaching and worked with youth and disabled children while developing an interest in composition. Between 1949 and 1953, she studied with Fré Focke, Rene Leibowitz, and Olivier Messiaen. Between 1963 and 1968, she also studied electronic music and wrote a number of electronic pieces.
She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 and lived for several years in Paris and Cologne. Besides new music classical compositions and musical theater, Alexander was active in composition for television soundtracks and composed for soap opera. In her later years, she composed several "hörspiel" pieces, or "plays for listening", several of them for the WDR Radio of Cologne.
On August the 7th, 2005, Alexander died in Santiago.