About me
Recipient of the prestigious Bundesverdienstorden in 2022, the Thuringia Order of Merit in 2017 and the Weimar Prize in 2016, Dr. Alan Bern (accordion/piano) is the founding artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar, the OMA Improvisation Project, and the Other Music Academy (OMA) in Weimar, Germany. Bern is a composer/arranger, pianist, accordionist, educator, cultural activist and philosopher. He is co-founder and director of Brave Old World, The Semer Ensemble, The Other Europeans and Diaspora Redux, and he also performs with the Kadya Trio, Noah Balgley-Bendix, Bern, Brody & Rodach, Guy Klucevsek and many others. His education included classical piano with Paul Badura-Skoda and Leonard Shure, jazz with Karl Berger, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton and others, contemporary music with John Cage, Frederic Rzewski, Joel Hoffman and others, and philosophy and cognitive science with Daniel Dennett. He received his M.A. in Philosophy and his D.M.A. in Music Composition. He has composed and directed music for theater and dance in New York, Montreal, Berlin, Luzern, Essen and Bremen, among others. He is the creator of Present-Time Composition (PTC©), an original method for collective real-time composition informed by insights from cognitive science.
