Josef Tal (born 1910), Israeli composer, pianist, and professor of music, allowed Middle Eastern music to influence him, but stayed in the mainstream of contemporary European music, in which tradition he had been trained.

Josef Tal (formerly Gruenthal) was born in 1910 in Pinne, near Poznan, German Poland. He studied composition and music education with Max Trapp and Heinz Tiessen at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Other teachers there included Hindemith, Sachs, Kreutzer, and Saal. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Josef Tal emigrated to Palestine. For two years he was an agricultural worker at Kibbutz Gesher.

Three years later, in 1937, Tal became a professor of piano and composition at the Academy of Music in Jerusalem. After the establishment of Israel as a sovereign nation the academy was renamed the Israel Academy of Music, and Tal became its first director, a post he held from 1948 to...