Daniel Alcheh

Composer, orchestrator, sound designer and music technologist Daniel Alcheh was Born in 1972 and his works have been performed worldwide. He holds a Bachelors and a Masters degree in composition from Tel-Aviv University and was a student of many of Israel's greats names - Yitzhak Sadai, Noam Sheriff and many others.

While in his early 20s, Alcheh was awarded the Israeli Composer League’s Klon Prize for Composition. In 2000, his violin solo piece, “Nocturne and Aubade,” was chosen as the obligatory contemporary piece for competitors to perform at the 2002 Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition. A month later, Alcheh appeared as a guest composer to The 22nd Asian Composers League Festival in Seoul, Korea, where his "String Trio” for Violin, Viola and Cello was a prizewinner. Also in 2002, his ballet piece "No Exit" was choreographed in Germany and performed to high acclaim throughout Europe and the Middle East.

In 2002, Alcheh was invited as a visiting scholar to the Music Technology Department at Chicago's Northwestern University. This appointment was enabled by a grant from the America-Israel Culture Foundation. While in Chicago, he wrote his demanding "Dying Pianos" for piano duo and recorded sound. Created through a framework of measures growing ever closer, the piece is a kind of black hole collapse: it crushes itself with sounds that seem to have grown malignantly out of control. “Dying Pianos” would premiere in Tel-Aviv, performed by the renowned Israeli Piano Duo, who commissioned the piece.

A simultaneous thread to Alcheh’s classical-contemporary music career has been his deep involvement with technology, electronic music, recording and film. While still an undergraduate, Alcheh began scoring films and animation. By 2001, his professor Yosef Bardanashvili, one of Israel’s most renowned and prolific composers, would bring him aboard as a soundtrack producer for Dover Kosashvili's feature film Late Marriage: the highest-grossing Israeli film of the decade, one of Entertainment Weekly's Ten Best Films of 2002 and Newsweek's Top 15 Films of 2002. His most recent U.S. credits include music for the National Geographic Channel’s feature The Madness of Henry VIII, where he created some of his most memorable cues: lunging, epic orchestral music with powerful electronic strokes. He also wrote the complete underscore for BET networks' new series, The Music Makers, profiling black film and TV composers. He wrote the series’ opening theme, sung by soul singer Jaguar Wright of The Roots.

Daniel worked extensively with Pacific Street Films, which was recently honored with a MoMA retrospective. Alcheh often collaborates with up-and-coming directors on experimental shorts, theater productions and documentaries. Some of the last year’s collaborations include avant-garde Danish director Anders Bramsen (Le Mis Popote), theater director Jeff Janisheski (Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind), New York filmmakers Nicole Franklin and Michael Knowles, and director Dutch Doscher for whom he recently completed the score to “Leave You In Me.”

Daniel lives in Nyack, New York, with his wife, writer Jamie Kiffel-Alcheh.

www.danielalcheh.com
daniel@danielalcheh.com
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