Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History

ISBN-13: 9780199354948 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 304 str.

Assaf Shelleg

Opis

Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History unfolds the cultural itineraries of modern Jewish and Israeli art music. Extending from modern Jewish art music in Europe through its dislocation to British Palestine and Israel, the book captures the tensions between national rhetoric and nationalized theological tropes through the way they have been recorded in art music.

Author Assaf Shelleg begins with the prehistory of Israeli art music in central and Western Europe. He introduces the reader to the various aesthetic dilemmas in the history of modern Jewish art music, ranging from auto-exoticism to Jewish self-hatred. Moving on to consider the Hebrew culture, he discusses the institutionalization of art music in British Palestine and the dilution of romanticist nationalism during the interregnum of Israeli statehood. Delving into the proliferation of styles in the 1950s and '60s, Shelleg examines the collapse of traditional Hebrew templates and the concomitant surge of linear compositional devices inspired by Arab Jewish music. By the 1970s, he reveals, Israeli composers saw musical Judaism as a cultural discourse that transcended the nation; they deterritorialized the national discourse at the same time that religious Zionist circles had been translating theology into politics.

Shelleg unearths the various cultural constraints and dialectics that played a pivotal role in the dislocation of modern Jewish art music to Israel, and looks at the Jewish undercurrents of Hebrew culture and how Jewish secularized concepts outgrew their national functions. Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History will be essential reading for scholars of Jewish and Israeli music, culture, and history

Recenzje

This path-breaking book demolishes old myths about Israeli music's origins; transforms our understanding of the relationship between Jews, antisemitism, and classical music; and introduces a powerful new voice into the field of Israeli cultural history. -James Loeffler, Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire

O autorze

Assaf Shelleg is the Schusterman Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology and Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Virginia. He was previously the visiting Efroymson Scholar in the Jewish, Islamic & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department at Washington University in St. Louis. Specializing in twentieth-century Jewish and Israeli art music, Shelleg's research has been published in some of the leading journals in both musicology and Israel Studies. A trained pianist, he is also a regular musical contributor to Ha'aretz newspaper.