Alan Bern

Alan Bern (Bloomington, Indiana, 1955) is an American Jewish composer, pianist, accordionist, educator and cultural activist, based in Berlin since 1987.

He is the founding artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar and the Other Music Academy (OMA).

He is internationally recognized for his contributions to the research, dissemination and creative renewal of Jewish music with Brave Old World, The Other Europeans and the Semer Ensemble, among others.

He is the creator of Present-Time Composition, a musical and educational approach informed by cognitive science that integrates the methods of improvisation and composition.

He received a B.A. cum laude in Religious Studies from Indiana University Bloomington (1976), an M.A. in Philosophy under Daniel Dennett from Tufts University (1983) and a D.M.A in Music Composition under Joel Hoffman from the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati (2006).

In addition to his formal education, Bern studied classical piano with Sidney Foster, Paul Badura-Skoda and Leonard Shure and chamber music with Josef Gingold and György Sebök.

He studied jazz with David Baker at Indiana University Bloomington and Improvisation with Ran Blake at the New England Conservatory.

At the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, he studied contemporary music with John Cage, Frederic Rzewski, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Carla Bley and Karl Berger, among many others.

As a musician and band leader, Bern is best known as co-founder of Brave Old World, founder of Diaspora Redux, The Other Europeans, and the Semer Ensemble.

He has also performed and recorded with the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Andy Statman, Bern, Brody & Rodach, Guy Klucevsek, the Accordion Tribe, The Klezmatics, Itzhak Perlman, Alpen Klezmer and Voices of Ashkenaz, among many others.

Beginning in 1999, Bern’s activities have increasingly been centered in Weimar, Germany.

He is artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar, the Other Music Academy (OMA), the OMA Improvisation Project, the OMA Middle Eastern Music & Cultures Project, and Weimar klingt!, among others, as well as chair of Other Music Academy e.V., the non-profit organization responsible for those projects.

Bern is founding artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar, a five-week summer institute and festival in Weimar, Germany.

Currently, it is the longest and most intensive program for the research, dissemination and creative renewal of Yiddish culture in the world.

YSW annually attracts students, artists, educators and audiences from more than 20 countries to its workshops, concerts, lectures and symposia, new music, dance and theater projects, jam sessions and more.

Bern’s artistic direction gives equal weight to subject matter and pedagogical approach.

YSW explores the subject of Yiddish culture as an ongoing, fundamentally intercultural process that is part of a complex matrix of European and non-European cultures.

Its pedagogical approach emphasizes experiential learning, embodied knowledge, diversity and social interaction, and the complementarity of artistic, scientific and social creativity.

Bern’s vision of YSW as a non-authoritarian, international and diverse learning community has been strongly influenced by the principles of Ted Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools.

Yiddish Summer Weimar has received awards from the European Union, the European Commission, the German Music Council, the German Federal Cultural Foundation, among others.

Bern is founding chair of Other Music Academy e.V., a non-profit organization with more than 100 members worldwide.

Founded in 2006 to carry out Yiddish Summer Weimar, its mission has expanded to include the Other Music Academy and all of its projects.

In 2009, the city of Weimar gave Other Music Academy e.V. a 33-year lease on an abandoned school building in Ernst-Kohl-Strasse 23 to be a base for the organization's projects and activities.

Bern envisioned for the building a new kind of institution dedicated to the inclusion and empowerment of widely diverse social groups, through cooperative participation in transdisciplinary projects that combine artistic, scientific and social/political practices.

The OMA is also the home for all of the current projects of Other Music Academy e.V., including Yiddish Summer, the Improvisation Project, the Open Café, the Middle Eastern Music and Cultures Project, and more.

The OMA building is undergoing renovation parallel to the development of the OMA organizational structure.

Presently, the OMA physical space comprises artist ateliers, workshop spaces, a music café and a small concert space.

The OMA organizational structure will eventually comprise three, interlocking parts: i) a Creation Tank, where projects are conceived and managed, ii) a Curriculum of learning goals and tasks which flow directly from the projects, and iii) a Social Center, including the OMA Café, which encourages interaction among all project participants. A 300 m2 space is currently being developed as a larger workshop and performance space.

The OMA has received recognition and support from the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the City of Weimar and the State Chancellery of Thuringia, among others.

Bern is the creator of Present-Time Composition, a musical and educational approach informed by cognitive science that integrates the methods of improvisation and composition.

He has taught workshops in PTC at the University of Cincinnati, the Conservatory of Music Franz Liszt (Weimar), to members of the Pittsburgh Symphony and members of the Lyon Symphony, at the University of Arnhem, the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, the University of Virginia, the Joseph Haydn Conservatory (Eisenstadt), at the Exploratorium Berlin, through the International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation, in the context of Winter Edition (Weimar) and the OMA Improvisation Project, among many others.

The fundamental principle of PTC is that highly complex musical decisions, normally thought to be the domain of composition, can be improvised in real time and communicated within a group, to produce a collectively improvised composition that is aesthetically comparable with music composed traditionally by individuals.

This involves extensive training with step-by-step exercises that teach the musician how to reduce increasingly complex musical perceptions to apparently simple and immediate impulses.

Currently, Bern is in the process of developing a certification program for PTC.

Bern is active as a composer and music director for theater and dance productions.

In 2016 he received the Weimar Prize in recognition of major cultural contributions to the city of Weimar.

In 2016-17 he composed a song cycle based on children’s poems by the Polish-Jewish poet, Kadya Molodovsky.

The song cycle was the centerpiece of the Kadya Choir project (www.kadya.eu), which brought together a girls choir from Weimar (Schola Cantorum Weimar) with a girls choir from Tel Aviv-Jaffa (Voices of Peace Choir) and is the subject of a feature-length documentary film The Young Kadyas that has been shown in German theaters and at international film festivals (https://www.1meter60-film.de/film-detail/die-jungen-kadyas/).

In 2017 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Free State of Thuringia, and in 2022 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Bern attended University High School.