The Israeli composer Ofer Ben-Amots made his dbut as a pianist at the age of nine, going on to study in Tel Aviva, Geneva, Detmold and finally at the University of Pennsylvania, after his emigration to the United States in 1987. A winner of composition prizes in Vienna, South Africa, and Japan, and in 1999 of the Aaron Copland Award and the Music Composition Artist Fellowship by the Colorado Council on the Arts. Ben-Amots is a Jerusalem Fellow of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity, and he has been its artistic director for North America since 1997. He is also associate professor of music at the Colorado College in Colorado Springs. His work for soprano, klezmer clarinet, and mens chorus, Mizmor: Seven Degrees of Praise, a setting of Psalm 150, had its first performance at Lincoln Center in New York in November 2003 as part of Only in America, an international conference-festival sponsored jointly by the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Milken Archive.
