Music

Born in Afula, Israel, Rakefet Bar Sadeh started to play the piano at the age of eight, and continued studying and performing throughout her youth. In 1987, she started her Natural Sciences studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, graduating with a B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics four years later. Mrs. Bar Sadeh’s scientific background later proved essential to enhancing her historical-analytical research skills in musicology.

 

Upon her completion of her undergraduate studies, Bar Sadeh embarked on the studies of musicology at the Hebrew University. Specializing in Renaissance music, her M.A. thesis focused on Claudio Monteverdi as a Composer of Instrumental Music: The Scherzi Musicali (1607). Rakefet Bar Sadeh continued with her doctoral studies, focusing on Jewish and Israeli music under the mentorship of Prof. Jehoash Hirschberg, one of the most illustrious researchers in the field. In 2009, Dr. Bar Sadeh completed her Ph.D. in Musicology at the Musicology department of the Hebrew University. Her dissertation topic is:  Concert Settings of Psalms by First and Second Generation Composers in the Land of Israel: Contexts of Composition, Ideological Factors and Stylistics Characteristics.

 

Following her Ph.D. graduation, Dr. Bar Sadeh continued her analytical and historical research of the early stages of Israeli art music. In 2011 she served as an organizer and academic consultant to the international conference Music in Exile, where she also presented a paper on the Israeli Ődőn Partós, the Jewish composer, exiled from Budapest who later established the Rubin Music Academy in Tel Aviv. Dr. Bar Sadeh has frequently presented her groundbreaking research on psalm settings by Jewish and non-Jewish composers in the twentieth century. This research introduces a new model developed specifically for the analysis of textual-musical linkage and interrelationship in the use of biblical Hebrew.

 

Most recently, Rakefet Bar Sadeh co-authored a new book on the life and music of the celebrated Israeli composer Yehezkel Braun (1922-2014) through the I.M.I., Israel Music Institute and Carmel Pub. This book was published in 2017. As a writer of leading Israeli Composers monographies, Dr. Bar-Sadeh published a second book with Jehoash Hirshberg   on the Life and work of the composer Tzvi Avni. The book was published in 2020 through Carmel Pub.   She is currently working on a monograph about Israeli-American composer Ofer Ben-Amots, where she already completed a detailed catalogue of his compositions between 1985-2015.  Among other activities she serves as an academic consultant to the ARC Ensemble at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Canada. This institution, under the direction of Simon Wynberg, revived music of escapee composers who fled Europe prior to World War 2, and whose music was never published or performed.

 

Dr. Rakefet Bar Sadeh has served as Director of the Faher Music Center at the Diaspora Museum, Beit Hatfutzot. She has taught regularly courses in music analysis and history at the Hebrew University, Hebrew Union College, The Jerusalem Municipality Music Center, and Beit Shmuel, among others. She is a member of the Israeli Musicological Association Council Committee. Dr. Bar-Sadeh held a position of Head of Music division at the ministry of culture between the years 2020-2022.