Background
Haim Alexander was born on August 9, 1915, in Berlin, Germany.
Haim Alexander was born on August 9, 1915, in Berlin, Germany.
Haim Alexander settled in Israel in 1936. His studies at the Stern Conservatory were halted in 1936 as a result of the Nazi persecution, and in the same year, he emigrated to Palestine. There he studied composition with Stefan Wolpe and piano with Irma Wolpe-Schoenberg and Ilona Vince-Kraus. As a student, he made his living as a café jazz pianist in Jerusalem and established himself as an excellent improviser.
Since 1945, Haim Alexander taught piano, music theory, cembalo, and composition at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Jerusalem. He also taught at the musicology departments of Tel-Aviv University, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, at the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, Geneva, and at New York University.
Died on March 18, 2012, at the age of 96 in Jerusalem, Israel.
Haim Alexander established his own personal response to the dialectics of the ideological pressure of the Zionist vision of the East and the internal pressure to retain and absorb the great European heritage. He was always alert and open to new ideas and influences.
Quotes from others about the person
Haim Alexander wrote in the Mediterranean style - modal chromaticism - as in his lively six Israeli Dances (1950), and after the "musical shock" (his own term) he received in Darmstadt (since 1958), he wrote in both styles - the one more "national," the other rather "cosmopolitan" - sometimes integrating them as in his Patterns (piano, 1973), commissioned for the Rubinstein Competition.
Haim Alexander was married to Ruth Rosenbaum and had 2 children.