Jewish Music and Modernity

Abstract

Is there really such a thing as Jewish music? And does it survive as an expressive practice of worship and identity against modernity? This book poses such questions in new and critical ways by surveying a vast diasporic landscape, taking into consideration the many ways music historically witnessed the confrontation between modern Jews and the world around them, from the waning of the Middle Ages until the Holocaust. The book examines the confluence of many styles and repertories as Jewish music: the sacred and the secular; folk and popular music; songs in which Jewish languages — Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew — survived in isolation and songs that transformed the nations in which they lived. When Jewish music entered modernity, authenticity became an ideal supplanted by composite traditions. Klezmer music emerged in communities cohabited by Jews and Roma; Jewish cabaret resulted from the collaborations of migrant Jews and non-Jews in nineteenth-century Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna; cantors and composers experimented with new sounds. Modern Jewish music was and is varied, and this book is notable for the ways in which the borders between repertories are crossed and modernity is enriched by the shift of Jewish music from cultural peripheries to the center. Understanding the crisis of modernity — the Holocaust and its aftermath — is crucial to the challenge this book poses for understanding music in our own day.

Remembering Armenian music in Bolis: Komitas Vardapet in transcultural perspective

“…Like debates about Armenian music, they were tied up with imagined memories of classical antiquity, fuelled by geopolitical concerns, and profoundly influenced by the views of European musicologists. To give another example, the cultural memory of Jewish music that emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was similarly built around the notion of a lost homeland, depended on the idealisation of rural life by an urban intelligentsia, and reflected growing tensions between confessional and national identity (Bohlman, 2008). The reinvention of collective musical memories was thus a widespread phenomenon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, precipitated by increasing contacts between diverse peoples, technological and social changes related to urbanisation, and the global circulation of ideas concerning the connection between music and nationhood.…”

Ali Baba, Genghis Khan, and Jimmy, who are they!? The transnational and trans-regional production of modernity in 1980s’ Chinese disco

“…A chronological delineation of musical history can display the development of music and culture when the definition of modernity is historicized from the late 16th to the late 20th century in Europe. This setup of time and space has produced the multiple hierarchies of genre, race, and class, for example, the tradition and invention of Jewish music (Bohlman, 2008), the intersection of modernity and nationality in Bartók’s case in Hungary (Schneider, 2006), and the imagination of modernity between South Africa and the West in music (Erlmann, 1999). A problem in this approach is that the progress of worldwide modernity is never synchronized.…”

Austriaʼs Legacy in Early Radio Broadcasting: Lessons for Audio Media in the 21st Century

“…Die Klabriaspartie was the most popular Jewish theatrical production in Europe. It was performed more than 5,000 times before the rise of Nazism in 1938 (Bohlman, 2008;Wacks, 2002, pp. 57-58).…”