(b. Berlin, 25 Aug 1902; d. New York, 4 April 1972).
American composer of German origin and Russian-Viennese parentage. He studied with Juon and Schreker at the Berlin Musikhochschule (1919-24) and also benefited from contact with Busoni and from attending lectures at the Bauhaus. Up to 1933 he gave himself to the cause of radical socialism and wrote populist songs while using an atonal style for larger works. In March 1933 he fled to Vienna, where he had orchestration lessons from Webern. The next year he reached Palestine and wrote Hebrew songs influenced by local folk music, while subjecting his atonal style to rigorous discipline. In 1938 he moved to the USA, where he taught and continued to explore ways of achieving dynamism in an athematic, atonal style: the breakthrough came in Enactments for three pianos (1953), followed by a succession of almost exclusively instrumental compositions of similar abstracted energy and determination. He had a substantial impact on some younger New York composers.
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