* In Memoria *
by Kenneth M. Kapp
versiunea română poate fi citită aici
Yehuda Yannay was a composer, conductor, performer, and a multimedia artist. He was born on May 26, 1937 in Timișoara, Romania. Miraculously, he and his immediate family, Hungarian speaking Jews, survived the war. However, living conditions became dire with increasing antisemitism and the Romanian Communist party seizure of his family’s small paper-goods factory in 1948. His family with Yehuda emigrated to Israel in 1951.
Yannay was a polyglot and well-read in several languages. He was my good friend and for years we met regularly for a “quick cup” of coffee, talking more about literature and art than music. Our chats often lasted for hours and, often, a half a cup of cold coffee was on the table when we finally got up to leave.
[photo: Marie E Mellott]
His early interests were mainly in the natural sciences and it was only after his mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Force that he returned to music. He studied composition privately with Alexander Uriah Boskovich, later enrolling and graduating from the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv in 1964. A Fulbright Fellowship enabled him to pursue postgraduate degrees in music in the United States, earning an MFA at Brandeis University in 1966 and a DMA from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign in 1974.
He joined the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Department of Music in 1970, retiring in 2004. It was retirement in name only, now more than ever, he dedicated his energies full time to composition and performance as he continued to receive commissions from musical groups throughout the world.
Yannay was also a Fulbright professor at the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.
Jon Welstead was Professor and Director of the Electro-Acoustic Music Center at UWM. In 1981 he was recruited by Yannay (and John Downey and Gregoria Karides Suchy of the department’s Composition and Theory Area) to stand in for Yehuda’s composition/theory duties during his 1982 Sabbatical in Germany. He and Yehuda became good friends. Here are some of Jon’s memories:
“This was also the year Yehuda asked me to electronically orchestrate and record his movie score for “Jidyll” just completed by Dick Blau. Thus began my long journey working with Yehuda. That year, I replaced Yehuda’s teaching assignments and was to additionally establish and build a new Center for Electronic/Computer Composition. Yehuda and I developed this composition pathway knowing the vast expansion it would bring to new music and performance at UWM and beyond. For the next 30 years, we collaborated, team-taught, presented and performed new music-art-theatre throughout the country via his Music From Almost Yesterday concert organization. As Yehuda stated in “Yehuda Composed” by Dan Boville, “Music is not worth to be written unless it’s a little bit crazy!” And I took this “journey of a lifetime” simply being a “little bit crazy” with Yehuda.
Boville’s film can be found on the internet:
In 1997, Jon, Yehuda and Steve Nelson-Raney released a CD, “The Ghost In The Machine.”
Never one to be confined in a narrow box, Yehuda became aware of the Theater of the Absurd in the late 1950s (and perhaps because Eugène Ionesco was also Romanian) he began working in theatrical-performance and collaborative filmmaking, acting in such films as Jidyll (1990) and Houdini’s Ninth (1973). Other works followed such as Radiant, Inner Light (1998–2000), Insomnia in Havana, a theater piece for a percussionist/actor, live electronics and projections (2005) and Midwest Mythologist (2012). In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, he worked with Marie Mellot, Jake Fuller, and Dick Blau.
Blau was kind enough to share one memory of Yehuda:
Early 80’s. YY is back from a Fulbright in Germany. Coffee.
YY: Hey, you wanna make a film? Every scene to have the color yellow or the Star of David.
Me: Audacious! We’ll get Jake Fuller to shoot it.
YY: Great! And let’s ask Jerry Fortier too. He can do sets, lighting, costumes, and special effects.
Three years later.
JIDYLL: The Wandering Jew shows up in Milwaukee and wanders through Western History, imagining himself as everyone from Jesus to Freud, Herzl, Dreyfuss, and (the arch enemy) Wagner.
Thirty scenes, thirty characters, all played by…YY, of course.
In summary. “Brilliant, playful, funny, brave, and o so talented. That was my dear friend, Yehuda Yannay.” You can see the result here:
Jake Fuller was the cinematographer and he recalls:
I met Yehuda when Dick Blau asked me to film Jidyll, the story of the wandering Jew in Milwaukee. That spawned a long friendship that involved long walks during which we exchanged books, health talk, but not too much, and general philosophy of life. Jill Sebastian and I hosted house concerts, first in Jill’s studio for years then switching to nearby Hawthorn Gallery. I also filmed the house concerts for years. They can be found on Vimeo and YouTube.
Marie Mellott, is a mixed media artist also working in performance art, photography, computerized images for theatre, and creative writing for multimedia. She was interviewed in 1993 by Romanian National Radio, Bucharest, Romania. Married to Yehuda for 31 years, she worked with him on many projects including the video “I Can’t Fathom It”
She recalls “Yehuda wrote the music and I did the drawings at the same time. He would come to the basement studio and check out the drawings and go back to his studio to write the music. It was about the tragedies committed on women during war.
“We also recited together a poem by Yehuda Amicai, an Israeli poet. Yehuda did it in Hebrew and I did it in English.”
The experimental and broad multimedia atmosphere at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign when Yehuda was there inspired him to invent new musical instruments and techniques incorporated in his compositions of Wraphap (1969), Coloring Book for the Harpist (1969), and Coheleth (1970). He also began conducting new works by other contemporary composers.
[photo: Marie E Mellott]
It was only natural for him to continue this when he came to UWM. And shortly after his arrival he found the concert series Music from Almost Yesterday. This series continues under the leadership of Josh Schmidt, one of Yehuda’s many students.
“Im Silberwald” (In the Silvers Forest), written for trombone, glass harmonica, tape, trombone, glass harmonica, electronic mixing art work by Marie Mellott, is one of the compositions he wrote for that series.
It’s of interest since you can see the score – not your usual notes on clefs.
Yehuda frequently returned to Europe for the premiers of his commissioned pieces, e.g., a string quartet Two Alleys in Old Tel-Aviv (2013) and Berlin Music (2018) in Berlin.
Yehuda composed several pieces for saxophone quartet such as The Center Does Not Hold which premiered in Minneapolis in 2016. The sounds are exquisite. While his music may have been modern, as he is quoted in Wikipedia — “the minimal definition of an object named musical is an arrangement of sound and silence, which may or may not have imply functional order and it exists in a conceptual space and time,’ his compositions are both musical and approachable.
On October 15, 2024, Bernard Zinck, Associate Professor of Violin and Chamber Music Director at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, arranged a multimedia program, “A Celebration of Yehuda Yannay,” featuring both films with Yannay as well as several of his compositions.
Zinck was the soloist in “The Exquisite Viola” (Transcription for solo violin) and offered these insights:
Zinck: “The Exquisite Viola will be a premiere as Yehuda transcribed it for me from solo viola to solo violin. He did it about three years ago and wanted to hear it. With Covid, performances were in a halt and after, I just did not have time to learn the piece which is, as most of Yehuda’s music, complicated. It just seemed fitting to tackle the piece for this concert and spend many hours conversing with him through his music.”
Beginning in 2000, Yehuda began composing in close collaboration with the bayan/accordion virtuoso Stas Venglevski. It was an extremely productive relationship, expanding extensively both the repertory and use of the bayan.
Venglevski gladly shared his thoughts:
Thirty years of collaboration with Yehuda Yannay have been the most productive of my career. Yehuda wrote about 20 compositions for the bayan. He introduced me to many wonderful composers and musicians and also to the world of new music. I was lucky enough to perform many concerts and many premieres under his leadership. An unforgettable joint visit to Paris in 2012 for the world premiere of his 26 min work in four movements “Plus Aves Moins” (More from Less) for bayan and 24 flutes. How touched I am that almost all the works he wrote for the bayan are dedicated to me.
Gregory Flint was a good friend of Yannay and offered these thoughts about the compositions Yannay wrote for French horn and working with the composer:
Flint: “I met Yehuda in the 90’s when he asked me to perform “Hidden Melody”.
This began a long and fruitful collaboration in which I performed and recorded four more of his compositions including a solo piece Yehuda wrote for me “Hornology”, and “Tandem Pieces” created for Stas Venglevski and myself. Although his music can be very challenging to master, once it is learned I feel it lives in the performer quite naturally.
“Some of my fondest memories of Yehuda are the many lunches and coffees we shared. They were always lessons in learning, full of curiosity and ideas, leaving me with a strong desire to create.
“He was one of a kind and I miss him.”
Here’s a link to a video of Flint’s performance:
Mary Vigdor was Yehuda’s close companion for the last ten years of his life. She kindly shared some of her memories. She reminded me that he developed a close relationship with Rabbi Dinin of Lake Park Synagogue and “their regular discussions via Zoom were a highlight of his week.” Yannay studied with him and had his Bar Mitzvah just a few years ago. Here’s a link to the video of that event taken by Jake Fuller and Dick Blau.
She pointed out that “Yehuda was also a favorite of my mother, Theresa, and he actually designed the cover of her Roman Catholic funeral program. He ended up attending quite a few family funerals at various RC churches with me and my family was always so happy to see him.”
In 2018 while visiting Phoenix, Arizona they made a side excursion to Sedona where Yehuda was persuaded to have an aura photograph taken. “The photographer exclaimed that Yehuda was so advanced spiritually that we should all be studying at his feet. He never took this seriously, of course. I think his great kindness was a sign of this advanced state. In my experience, people who are like this have no ego involvement in this attribute, they just perform good deeds spontaneously.”
[Yehuda Yannay as Dadaist poet Hugo Ball, performing Ball’s Gadji Beri Bimba in 2023. Photo by Dick Blau]
Mary recalls how “Yehuda was always so delighted to visit Romania and Hungary. His young relative (cousin’s grandson?), János, was a favorite.”
There are many videos of Yannay’s music and performances on You Tube and Vimeo for you to enjoy. Here’s one featuring Yehuda:
At minute 3 you can see him standing in front of his childhood home in Timișoara, Romania.
This article grew out of a preview I wrote that appeared in the Shepherd Express, an independent paper published in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. It was posted on October 11, 2024 and titled “Honoring the Life and Music of Yehuda Yannay.”
After a brief illness, Yehuda Yannay died in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA on December 14, 2023. He is missed by many worldwide.