Alan Bern

Alan Bern (Bloomington, Indiana, 1955) is an American 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. In 2016 he received the Weimar Prize in recognition of major cultural contributions to the city of Weimar.

Bern received a B.A. cum laude in Religious Studies from Indiana University (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 and Improvisation with Ran Blake at the New England Conservatory. At the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY, he studied contemporary music with John Cage, Frederic Rzewski, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Carla Bley and Karl Berger, among many others.

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