Prof. Michael Wolpe

Michael Wolpe, a composer and teacher, was born in Tel Aviv in 1960, a member of Kibbutz Sde Boker since 1982. He studied composition at the Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem and at Cambridge University in the UK. Completed a PHD thesis on the British symphony in the second half of the 20th century in the Department of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Serves as a professor at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and teaches at several schools and educational institutions in Jerusalem and the Negev region, including the Israel High School for Sciences and Arts (YASA), the High School for Environmental Education in Sde Boker, and the Mitzpe Ramon College of Music. For six years, he served as the artistic director of the Israeli Music Festival (until 2012). At the beginning of the first decade of the twenty-first century, for about a decade Wolpe was involved in the educational activities of Beit Terezin in Givat Haim, and was engaged in researching the music, composed during the Holocaust. The fruits of his research are number of creative works, among them the completion of works by composers who perished in the Holocaust, and few original compositions, inspired by these works .
Wolpe won the Israeli artists' organization (ACUM) Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009 and the Rosenblum Award for the Performing Arts of the City of Tel Aviv in 2010 for his work as an artistic director and composer. In 2014, he won the Prime Minister's Award for Composers for the second time. In December 2018, he was awarded the Yitzhak Navon price by the Minister of Culture, for his contribution to the cultivation of Jewish and Israeli culture.
In 2015-2016, Wolpe served as chief conductor and artistic director of the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra in Ashdod. Today he continues to lead the "Sounds in the Desert" festival, in Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Ramat Negev Regional Council, dedicated to Israeli music in all its shades and styles, which he founded in the Ramat Negev Regional Council in 1998, and also serves as artistic director of the "Pianos" festival at the Jerusalem Theater, of which he is one About its founders in 2013.
Wolpe's works include a variety of genres, including chamber music, orchestral music, choir music, popular songs, arrangements, piano music and community music, which rooted in his creative activity in the kibbutz community.
Most of his works have not been published yet, and are in his possession. A significant part of music is displayed on various websites on the net.

Photo: Shimon Yair Cohen