Joel Mandelbaum

Mayer Joel Mandelbaum (born October 12, 1932) is an American music composer and teacher, best known for his use of microtonal tuning (notably just intonation and 19 equal temperament and the 31 equal temperament). He wrote the first Ph.D. dissertation on microtonality in 1961. He is married to stained glass artist Ellen Mandelbaum, and is the nephew of Abraham Edel. Career Born in New York City, Mandelbaum received his Ph.D. from Indiana University School of Music in music theory in 1961. He also studied at the Harvard and Brandeis universities, as well as the Berkshire Music Center and the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. His composition teachers included Boris Blacher, Luigi Dallapiccola, Irving Fine, Walter Piston, and Harold Shapero. He was a teacher and chairman of the music department at Queens College, City University of New York, from 1961 to 1999. Mandelbaum became interested in microtonality after listening to a lecture by Paul Hindemith in which Hindemith inadequately debunked various alternative forms of tuning. He began a correspondence with Adriaan Fokker which led to a six-week stay in Haarlem, Netherlands, in 1963, during which he composed music using Euler’s genera und