Tzvi Avni

Tzvi Avni

Tzvi Avni was born in Saarbrücken, Germany in 1927 and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1935.
He studied at the Music Academy in Tel Aviv under Abel Ehrlich and Mordecai Seter, under whose direction he graduated from the Tel Aviv Music Academy in 1958. He also studied with composer Paul Ben-Haim and pianist Frank Peleg.
​In 1962, upon recommendation from Edgar Varese, he began to study electronic music at Columbia University under the direction of Vladimir Ussachevsky. In the summer of 1963 he attended the Tanglewood Music Center, studying composition with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss.
From 1971 to 2015 he was a professor of theory and composition at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and founded the Academy’s electronic music studio.
​In 2001 he was awarded the Israel Prize, the greatest honor bestowed upon an artist in Israel. He received the EMET prize in 2015 and the Israel Prime Minister Prize for Composers in 1998. In 1986 he was awarded the ACUM Lifetime Achievement Award. Two of his compositions, Meditations on a Drama and Epitaph, have won ACUM prizes. In 1973 he was awarded the Tel Aviv Municipality’s Engel Prize for his composition Holiday Metaphors. He was also awarded the ​Culture Prize of the Saarland in 1998 and the Küstermeier Prize by the Israeli-German Friendship Association.
His works are frequently performed in Israel and around the world. Many of them are available on CDs and are published and available at IMI, the Israel Music Institute.