Henry Pool Resume

      Henry Pool is born on June 12, 1939 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, as the second of four siblings, all boys. His family suffered with the rest of the Dutch nation the horrors of the Second World War. After the war he went to elementary school, high school and teachers’ seminary. He worked seven years as a teacher in Amsterdam, then emigrated to Israel. After a short sojourn in kibbutz Sha’alvim he joined begin 1967 a Rabbinical College in Netivot. In 1969 he married Lilette Sroussi, a girl from Paris, France, who emigrated to Israel in 1968. During the years the couple has been blessed with five children. In 1974 they moved to Jerusalem, where he started to work as a graphic artist. In 1988 they emigrated to the USA, where they still live, now as American citizens. In the USA he worked as a computer operator. In 2004 he retired.

Though his career as a composer hasn’t been an easy one, he managed over the years to rise to the level of a professional composer. Beside one year (at age 8) of piano lessons he never got any training. He has taught himself and learned by playing the piano, studying the compositions of the masters, going to concerts, listening to classical radio and recordings and from exploring books on composition, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, etc.. His first compositions were written in some late-romantic and impressionistic way. Later he destroyed all of them, because he found his own style, which is a modern classic-romantic one with elements of the Jewish music, which explains, why he is using different modes, like the dorian, the phrygian, the lydian and the mixolydian, beside de standard major and minor. So, a composition in C-so is written in the mixolydian (the so-) mode on the absolute scale of C. Certainly there are also elements coming from his native country, the Netherlands, while new elements, coming from the American musical world are now entering his musical language.
Updated:  November 30, 2010

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