Yotam Haber is a composer based in Kansas City. He is a 2005 Guggenheim fellow,[1][2] a 2007 Rome Prize winner in Music Composition.,[3] and was named a 2023-2024 Fulbright Distinguished Senior Scholar,[4] teaching and researching at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.[5][circular reference]
Haber served as the artistic director of the MATA Festival from 2010 to 2014.[8][23] His work at the MATA festival was lauded by The New York Times as "a testament to MATA’s enduring mission and to the high standards maintained by its current directors, David T. Little and Yotam Haber."[24] During his final festival The New York Times further remarked "If there is one thing that sets the MATA Festival apart from many of the other contemporary-classical bounties New York regularly produces, it might be a robust international representation, which seems to have grown sharply since Yotam Haber — a Dutch-born global citizen and the festival’s artistic director from 2009 until this year — has been at the helm."[25]
Recent major projects include a commission for a concert length work, A More Convenient Season, for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra with chorus and soloists commemorating the 50th anniversary of an explosion that killed four in a Baptist church in Birmingham on September 15, 1963.[26] In 2015, Haber's first monographic album of chamber music, Torus, was released on Roven Records and distributed by Naxos to wide critical acclaim, hailed by New York's WQXR as "a snapshot of a soul in flux – moving from life to the afterlife, from Israel to New Orleans – a composer looking for a sound and finding something powerful along the way."[27] In 2015 he was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and Carnegie Hall for the 50 For the Future Project to write break_break_break for string quartet and electronics (electronics by Philip White).[28]
Haber's music has been well received, called "haunting" by New Yorker critic Alex Ross[29] and The New York Times.[30] The New York Times called Haber's From the Book of Maintenance and Sustenance "Alluring" and "Engaging" adding that "Mr. Haber used the soulful lower register of the viola to expressive effect, and its higher register to create intriguing timbres. Fluttering trills unfolded over lone piano notes; bell-like descending piano chords were echoed by gently ascending viola motifs. The piece faded to an enigmatic whisper at the end."[31] Haber was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as one of five classical musicians "2014 Faces To Watch,”[32] and chosen as one of the “30 composers under 40” by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's Project 440.[33]
