Matyash Sheyber
HungaryBiography of Matyash Sheaber
Matyash Sheaber was a Hungarian-British composer and music educator. He studied at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music from 1919 to 1924, where he was taught cello by Adolf Schiffer and composition by Zoltan Kodaly. During this time, Sheaber also assisted Kodaly in his travels around Hungary to record Hungarian folk songs.
Afterwards, Sheaber gave private lessons in Frankfurt-on-the-Main and played in ship orchestras. He briefly lived in the United States, where he became acquainted with jazz. In 1925, he submitted his Sextet to a composition competition in Hungary, but it was not recognized. Bela Bartok, who was on the jury, protested by withdrawing from the panel.
In 1928, Sheaber became a teacher at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt and opened the first jazz class in a European (and possibly worldwide) academic music institution. On March 3, 1929, Sheaber and his 19 students performed in a public concert, which was broadcasted on Frankfurt radio. However, with the rise of the Nazis, the jazz class at the Hoch Conservatory was closed.
For the next two years, Sheaber performed in various countries, including Moscow and Leningrad. In 1935, he settled in the United Kingdom. From 1942 onwards, he taught composition at Morley College in London, where some of his students included Peter Racine Fricker, Anthony Milner, and Angela Morley.
Sheaber's compositions include the one-act opera "Eva Spielt mit Puppen" (Eva Plays with Dolls, 1934), two works based on James Joyce's writings - the cantata "Ulysses" (1947) and "Three Fragments From A Portrait of An Artist As A Young Man" for reader, choir, and orchestra. He also wrote three string quartets, two operettas, several chamber works, and choral arrangements of Hungarian and Yugoslavian folk songs. Some of his works employed the twelve-tone technique, while others were influenced by jazz.
Sheaber tragically died in a car accident. Gyorgy Ligeti dedicated his orchestral composition "Atmospheres" (1961) to the memory of Sheaber.
