Sharon Eitan

Sharon Eitan was born in Israel in 1961 but spent a considerable part of his childhood in France and Belgium. In his teens he played the classical guitar and sang in a choir, but he only decided to study composition around the age of 23, after having already done a computer related job in the military for several years.

Eitan studied at the Rubin Academy of Music, Tel-Aviv University, now called the Buchman-Mehta School of Music, and at Bar-Ilan University. Eitan says that the teacher who helped him the most in the struggle to find his personal voice was Abel Ehrlich. After finishing his MA he was active as a composer for about 10 years, during which many of his works were performed in concert by various ensembles in Israel and abroad. Among these were, for example: “Sa joie dans la verite”, for soprano and string quartet, performed by several ensembles in Israel and later also in London, with Emma Bell and the Bochman quartet; the chamber opera “Der sterbende Mensch”, commissioned and premiered by the Vienna based ensemble “Musik Theater Opus Modern”; “Music for ten players”, premiered by the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra; the “Canonic Fantasy on ‘Ye banks and braes’” for string quartet, commissioned by the Israel Philharmonic and premiered in Glasgow University on its 500’th jubilee; the Violin Concerto, premiered in Havana with the Cuban Symphony Orchestra and soloist Anna Julia Badia; and many others.

Around the year 2000 Sharon Eitan went back to working as a computer programmer, and also studied physics and mathematics at Tel-Aviv University. Probably the most significant fruit of that period is his paper “Toward a geometrical foundation for physics”. In recent years, apart from working in computers, Eitan spent some of his time writing popular music, including pop-rock songs and some musicals, a most recent example being the chamber musical “Death of Tom the Dog” (2018), for which Eitan also wrote the libretto.

Here is a complete recording of the world premiere: