Alan Bern

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.

In 2009, the city of Weimar gave other music 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.

Bern is founding chair of other music 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.

Bern also composes music for contemporary dance, including for the Eliza Miller Dance Company production of “Sideways” and “Märchen” in New York (2002), for which he was given an award by the Mary Flagler Carey Trust.

He was Music Director for London KlezFest in the mid 2000s, and has taught on the faculty of Klezkanada, Klezkamp (New York), Moscow KlezFest, the International Klezmer Festival Fürth, the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków, the Singer Festival in Warsaw, and 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 e.V., the non-profit organization responsible for those projects.

Bern is active as a composer and music director for theater and dance productions. Between 1994-96 he was Music Director at the Bremen Municipal Theater, where he composed and directed music for productions of Angels in America, The Threepenny Opera and Midsummer Night’s Dream, among others. As a free-lancer, he has composed and directed music for theater productions at the Grillo Theater (Essen), the Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin), the German National Theater (Weimar), the Municipal Theater of Dortmund, and the Luzern Municipal Theater, among others. He has worked with directors Josha Sobol, Silvia Armbruster, Constanza Lauterbach, Charlie Risse and Christian Friedrich, among others. In 1992, he created a score based exclusively on music composed in the Vilnius Ghetto for Josha Sobol’s own production of his play “Ghetto” in Essen. In 2001, he directed music for the first production of The Threepenny Opera in Yiddish translation by Michael Wex, directed at the Saidye Bronfman Center for the Arts in of Montreal by Bryna Wasserman.

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).

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.