Yehuda Yannay is an American-Israeli composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

, conductor, film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 maker and performance art

Performance art

In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...

ist.

Yannay moved from Romania to Israel in 1951, where he studied with Alexander Uriya Boskovitch (Levy 2001), who influenced him greatly. After completing his studies at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv, he pursued postgraduate studies in America, enabled by a Fulbright Fellowship. At Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

 (MFA 1966), he studied with Arthur Berger

Arthur Berger

Arthur Victor Berger was an American composer who has been described as a New Mannerist.-Biography:Born in New York City, of Jewish descent, Berger studied as an undergraduate at New York University, during which time he joined the Young Composer's Group, as a graduate student under Walter Piston...

 and Ernst Krenek

Ernst Krenek

Ernst Krenek was an Austrian of Czech origin and, from 1945, American composer. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music...

, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (DMA 1974) he studied with Salvatore Martirano

Salvatore Martirano

Salvatore Giovanni Martirano was an American composer of contemporary classical music.Born in Yonkers, New York, he taught for many years at the University of Illinois...

, among others (Levy 2001). In 1968 he settled permanently in the USA.

Yehuda Yannay retired in 2004 from his position of Professor of Composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. There, he was founder of the Music From Almost Yesterday concert series at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, now celebrating 39 years of new music performances.

A winner of international and national composition awards, Yannay served as guest-professor at the Staatliche Hochschulen für Musik in Stuttgart and Hamburg. Yannay is a prolific and versatile composer, conductor, film maker, and performance artist whose list of more than a 120 works include music for orchestra, electronic, live electronic and synthesizer pieces, environmental compositions, film, music-theater, and a large body of vocal and chamber music pieces. Considered an international figure in contemporary music, his contributions to new ideas in 20th century music are listed in articles, textbooks and encyclopedias of music (Cope 1976; Levy 2001; Randel 1978; Schwarts and Godfrey 1992; Slonimsky 1978; Vinton 1974).