Yair Klartag was born in 1985 in Israel. He studied composition with Ruben Seroussi at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, and pursued his Master’s degree at the Basel Academy of Music with Georg Friedrich Haas before he successfully defended his dissertation at Columbia University in 2019. Klartag has received several awards such as the Irino Prize and the Kompositionspreis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart; he was also a resident artist at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. In 2021, Klartag wins the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers’ Prize.

Klartag’s music focuses on the continuous perception of the listener: “I never perceive a piece of music as a whole, but rather as a continuous evolving experience – a series of ‘nows’. […] I care a lot about the inner form of a sound – understanding the duration that it needs to unfold and to be perceived. Playing with and against these inherent durations of sounds is one of the most frequently used strategies in my compositional tool box.”

Yair Klartag’s new work for the centenary of the Donaueschinger Musiktage Awkward Dances and Passacaglia will be performed by Klangforum Wien. Further commissions include his music-theater piece Six Memos from the Last Millenium for ensemble handwerk and the Münchener Biennale, a harp trio commissioned by Brandeis University’s Lazarof Prize and Rationale, a piece for soprano and ensemble for the Israel Contemporary Players, also performed by Ensemble Modern in Munich and Frankfurt. Yair Klartag is laureate of ricordilab 2019-2022, his works are published by Ricordi Berlin.

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