Yasser, Joseph

Joseph Yasser was born April 16, 1893 in the Polish city of Lódź, at that time part of the Russian Empire. At the age of six he was brought to Moscow, where he studied piano for several years with pianist/ composer Jacob Weinberg. Yasser entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1912. He graduated with high honors in 1917, after studying piano with A. Goedicke, organ with B. Sabaneev and music composition with N. Morozov. After the death of Sabaneev, Yasser succeeded him in 1918 as head of the conservatory organ department. He was also appointed chief organist of the Imperial Opera (Bolshoi Theatre) in 1919. From 1920-21 he toured Siberia as a pianist and lecturer with a state quartet. Yasser left the newly formed Soviet Union for Shanghai, China, where for the next two years, 1921-22, he directed the "Shanghai Songsters" choral society and played concerts which included a piano quintet of his own composition. He traveled the suppounding region and began investigating Chinese melodies, as well as Chinese instruments and their tuning. Yasser emigrated to the U.S. in 1923, settling in New York City. He gave organ recitals in 1927 and 1928, successfully performing his own transcription of Lizst's "Totentanz" for organ and orchestra. He conducted the chorus for a benefit performance of Stravinsky's Les Noces at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1929. Yasser found full-time employment as organist and choir director at Congregation Rodeph Shalom in 1929. He would retire from this position in 1960. Yasser's passion for music theory surfaced with two articles on Chinese music published in the Musical Courier in 1924. He elaborated on his theories about musical temperament in various music journals between 1928 and 1930. These culminated in the publication of his book, A Theory of Evolving Tonality (New York, 1932). In it, he traced the development of pentatonic and heptatonic scales, and proposed dividing the musical octave into nineteen equal parts. The book was published by the American Library of Musicology, an organization founded, in 1931, by both Yasser and Charles Seeger. 1930 was an important year for Yasser. On January 19th he co-founded the New York Musiclogical Society [NYMS] with musicologists Seeger and Otto Kinkeldey and composer/ theorists Henry Cowell and Joseph Schillinger. In 1934 this fledgling organization became the American Musicological Society [AMS]. On February 10th, 1930 he began leading theoretical discussions--in Russian--with the extraordinary "Russian Group of Musicologists in New York City" that included such émigré composers as Joseph Achron, Alexandre Gretchaninoff and the theorists Joseph Schillinger, Nicholas Slonimsky and Leon Theremin. Yasser theories on musical harmony were published in his second book, Medieval Quartal Harmony: A Plea for Restoration. In it, he argued convincingly for a system of harmonizing pentatonic melodies--including Jewish biblical chant--that is based upon the interval of a perfect fourth. The book was first published in three installments in the Musical Quarterly, 1937-1938, and then published in full by the American Library of Musicology.

It was a 1931 presentation on biblical cantillation by composer/ theorist Solomon Rosowsky that awakened Yasser's interest in the theoretical study of Jewish music. In January 1932, he helped Joseph Achron and Lazare Saminsky found Mailamm, an organization of musicians and lay people dedicated to the cause of Jewish music in the U.S. and Palestine. The organization lasted until 1941 and presented concerts and lectures in New York and Los Angeles. It also helped establish a National University Music Library and Conservatory of Music in Jerusalem. In November 1939, Yasser helped composer A.W. Binder found the Jewish Music Forum [JMF], a professional organization devoted to the "public reading of scholarly papers ... and the presentation of new and original works...." Yasser frequently presented papers at the Forum, served as its chairman from 1945-1948 and became editor-in-chief of its Bulletin. The JMF disbanded in 1962. Yasser also was an active member of the the National Jewish Music Council [NJMC]. Founded in 1944, this organization was dedicated to promoting and raising the standards of Jewish music in the U.S. by sponsoring commissions and other activities. The NJMC lasted until 1980. Joseph Yasser began teaching at the newly-founded Cantors Institute at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1951. Here he was an important mentor to younger musicians, especially composer/ pianist Herman Berlinski, to whom he taught organ. In 1960, Yasser retired from Rodeph Sholom and ca. 1960 from the Cantors Institute. In 1967 he contributed an article on "The Hebrew Folk Society of St. Petersburg: Ideology and Technique" to The Historic Contribution of Russian Jewry to Jewish Music (New York: NJMC). A year later the NJMC brought out a special biographical supplement that honored Yasser on his 75th birthday. Yasser was again honored in 1970, this time by the Jewish Liturgical Music Society of America, with the publication of Albert Weisser's Selected Writings and Lectures of Joseph Yasser: an Annotated Bibliography. It contains 147 items, many of them unpublished lectures. Over a forty-year period, Joseph Yasser published articles on a variety of Russian musical topics in the daily newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo. In 1960 he published an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society which combined his interest in both Jewish and general musicology, entitled "The Magrepha of the Herodian Temple." The article was written in 1958 for a Festschrift celebrating the eightieth birthday of AMS co-founder Otto Kinkeldey. Yasser and his wife Marie had no children and, after retirement, he continued with his musicological and other pursuits, though at a much slower pace. His correspondence reveals that his mind neither lost its acuity nor its visionary perspective. He died in New York City on September 6, 1981.

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