Katie Clearfield (28) knew from a young age that she wanted to be a Kinneret. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the Tel Aviv University Academy of Music, she joined the Israeli Chamber Orchestra and taught private music and at the conservatory. She has been a programmer for three years at Varonis, a company that deals with cyber security and big data and provides information security services to thousands of customers around the world.
“It did not happen in one day, but I realized that I needed a turn in my life. In general, the music situation in Israel is very unfortunate. 30% of my fellow musicians went through a profession and those who succeeded most of them because they had to leave abroad. The average salary to play an orchestra in Israel is a little above the minimum. In high-tech it is far above. I started thinking, do I love music so much that I am willing to sacrifice life in Israel for it? I decided to look for something else, “said Clearfield.
It is difficult to say whether musicians who are making the transition to the high-tech field is a phenomenon that has been expanding in recent years, but the story of 8 of them.
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Katie Clearfield
( Emanuel Clearfield)
The connection to programming dates back to high school, when she studied science and mathematics in a Technion class. “I spent most of my time in music but when I thought about what I could do if not music, programming was the first idea. I enrolled in a software development course for academics,” Clearfield added.
There is also the emotional element. As much as a piece will be written perfectly it will not be performed without the soul that the performer puts into it. Same thing in programming, constantly striving to produce the ideal product. I want the product I develop to excite the customer. We are used to thinking that there is a dramatic leap between music and programming, but in reality it is a direct line! “, Clearfield added.
Elon Rozman (31) is a programmer at Artlist, a company that provides content creators around the world with innovative video and image editing software, less connected to the word conversion. “I come from a field of creation and composition and continue to do so. A lot of composers make a living from teaching or other fields in music, and some like me decide to take a daily job and continue the work. At some point I decided to look for another field but I continue to define myself as a creative musician.”
He comes from the world of concerts and classical music. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in composition from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and was already on his way to a master’s degree abroad. I was looking for a framework that would interest me and that I would enjoy at work. I started experimenting with programming, with no background. I signed up for bootcamp, I became a web programmer. “It turns out that Artlist’s product is also related to the world I come from,” said Rozman.
“I did not think of it that way but if you go in depth, music is a world made up of orderly rules and a whole system. The world of theory has its own internal logic, and at the academic level you deal with things reminiscent of logic questions. “On the other hand, the field I deal with is construction and I find a bit of a loose connection between construction and creation. When writing an orchestration, we sometimes deal with solving problems or thinking,” Rozman concluded.
Shai Tobol, a senior software developer at Soluto, the Israeli development center of the American tech care giant Asurion, realized from a young age that a livelihood from music would not come and signed up for the computer studies reserve. “As a high schooler in Eilat, I thought it was possible to conquer the world and pretty quickly realized that this is not the direction, but music is my great love. In high school we formed a band, in the army I continued to play (electric guitar) at the base and today I am in a solo band.”
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Shai Tobol
( PR Soloto)
It turns out that many high-tech companies boast a home band made up of employees. “People have hobbies and not everyone can turn them into a profession and choose other paths. High-tech companies have found it appropriate to give an opportunity to those who want to express themselves and the company uses the band at company events.
Both music making and code writing have the ability to express yourself and create. There is a basic pattern – in music it is characters and in these programming lines of code and spaces – you have to give them a twist. Both areas are mentally challenging, developing creativity and thinking outside the box. “When you work on a piece of music or a piece of software, the experience and the training lead to results that get better,” said Tobol.
“Music is essentially the connection between math and emotion,” Bloch says. “The difference between a major chord and a minor is the difference in the interval of one of three sound waves playing together. It’s weird and crazy and surprising that the connection is not clear. I think programmers, like other musicians and artists, are mostly idealistic people with a desire for perfection and influence, with the patience to invest their soul in trying things over and over until they work. When I was 4 my dad bought me a Commodore 64 and my mom enrolled me in piano lessons, so I spent I spent my childhood in Be’er Sheva playing computer games and playing classical music. ”
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Yoni Bloch
( Alon Banari)
Tomer Lahav (37), lives in New York, is the director of a research and development center at EKO and a guitarist in Bloch’s band (when he is in Israel), studied programming at Tel Aviv College.
“My programming and music started together at the age of 10 and I think there are many parallels between the song building process and the software building process. Both need a strong foundation – this software has good architecture and a song that will be a good skeleton. The construction process is very iterative. Evolves and changes, so does the software.When you hear the finished product (album or song) you do not know that it has gone through a lot of versions and sounds different at different stages.
Lahav understood from the beginning that he would not be able to make a living from music in the country and has always invested in his two passions. “This is what I like to do as a child. I had sleep disorders, so at night I would program because it could be done alone in front of a computer. That’s how it all started.”
“It’s hard to spot it from the outside but programming is a creation,” says Gottlieb (brother of actor Uri Gottlieb). “There is a riddle that needs to be solved and the way is the creation. It is to build, to look ahead, to see what will work and what will cause what.”
Yair Klartag, a programmer at the Juitons company that develops an app for learning music, has found a way to combine the two worlds. He began playing keyboards and piano at the age of 10 and has a combined bachelor’s degree in computer science and music, a master’s degree in composition from Switzerland and a doctorate in composition from Columbia University. “I compose contemporary classical music, a sub-genre not very popular in Israel, music for orchestral instruments sometimes with electronic means.”
“I do not feel there is a structural resemblance between music and programming, I do feel that engaging in sound is something abstract that cannot be kneaded, music is waves in the air that cannot be touched. So when I imagine it abstract there are few things that are similar to math and computers, but beyond that these Two different worlds. ”
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Yair Clartag
( Press)
Claretg did not come to high-tech just for livelihood reasons. “I love the world of computers and all these years I worked in programming both out of love, and also from a place where I work in a not very popular musical world that does not have a lot of money and I did not want to compromise. The individualistic pursuit to find myself. “
“At Thelma Yellin, I increased physics and mathematics because I was also strong on the scientific side and enjoyed the combination. I was not able to reach the maximum technical required because I was not able to sit and focus.”
And yet there are elements in the personality that are characteristic of both areas. “A professional musician who has converted is probably a super professional. Someone who for years has played and rehearsed for hours over and over again, in the first place has a personality that can persevere in front of a computer and check comma, dot dot in code. Second, these are perfectionist people who want to do their job best. At least in the classical world it’s strong, from a young age a competitive world that tells you what to do. “Their personality structure and place of residence, in any case, would go to study programming. Musicians are definitely more creative and there is the causality and there is perseverance.”
Maimon herself was a cellist for many years, she is a graduate of the Jerusalem Academy of Music, she also played with his uncle Tessa. “In Thelma Yellin I increased physics and mathematics because I was strong on the scientific side as well and enjoyed the combination. When I went to study a degree in cello, focusing on the instrument did me no good. “I moved to the Lautman Outstanding Program at Tel Aviv University, I did two master’s degrees – in musicology and cognitive psychology. I love and live music and am attracted to science and musical cognition.