Joel Mandelbaum

Joel Mandelbaum (b.1932) (ASCAP) is Professor Emeritus at Queens College, C.U.N.Y., where he has taught since 1961. He has degrees from Harvard, Brandeis and Indiana Universities, where he studied composition with Walter Piston, Irving Fine, Harold Shapero and Bernhard Heiden, augmented by summer studies with Dallapiccola and Copland. Other influential teachers were Angela Diller, Helen Grant Baker and Tibor Kozma.

His works include operas: The Dybbuk (1972) and The Village (1995), the latter based on Susan Fox’s true story of a French village harboring Jewish boys from the Nazis, and The Man in the Man-Made Moon (1955, 1-act); 15 song cycles; 6 shorter song groups; choruses; orchestral/chamber works; experimental microtonal works. Works of his premiered by Lehrman & Williams include his “Song of the Common Man” and settings of Abel Meeropol’s “Remembrance,” a letter by Johannes Brahms, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets 78 & 116, the latter written for their wedding July 14, 2002. His 1961 dissertation, Multiple Division of the Octave and the Tonal Resources of 19-tone Temperament, remains in use as a reference.