Jewish music and modernity / Philip V. Bohlman.

Author/creator Bohlman, Philip V., 1952-
Format Book
Publication InfoOxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2008.
Descriptionxxxiii, 280 pages : illustrations, map, music ; 25 cm.
Subjects
Jews--Music. --History and criticism.
Modernism (Music)

SeriesAMS studies in music
AMS studies in music. ^A610677
Contents Prologue: before Jewish music -- Places of Jewish music. The Jewish village: music at the border of myth and history ; The people without music history: rediscovering Jewish music in the Mediterranean ; East and West -- Ontologies of Jewish music. Inventing Jewish music ; Self-reflecting-self: Jewish music collecting in the mirror of modernity ; Paths toward Utopia -- Beyond Jewish music. Parables of the metropole ; Jewishness in music: mirrors of selfness in Jewish music ; Staging Jewish music -- Epilogue: after Jewish music.
Abstract Is there really such a thing as Jewish music? And how does it survive as a practice of worship and cultural expression even in the face of the many brutal aesthetic and political challenges of modernity? This book imparts these questions with a new light that transforms the very historiography of Jewish culture in modernity. Based on decades of fieldwork and archival study throughout the world, the author intensively examines the many ways in which music has historically borne witness to the confrontation between modern Jews and the world around them. Weaving a historical narrative that spans from the end of the Middle Ages to the Holocaust, be moves through the vast confluence of musical styles and repertories. From the sacred to the secular, from folk to popular music, and in the many languages in which it was written and performed, he accounts for areas of Jewish music that have rarely been considered before. Jewish music, the author argues, both survived in isolation and transformed the nations in which it lived. When Jews and Jewish musicians entered modernity, authenticity became an ideal to be supplanted by the reality of complex traditions. Klezmer music emerged in rural communities cohabited by Jews and Roma; Jewish cabaret resulted from the collaborations of migrant Jews and non-Jews to the nineteenth-century metropoles of Berlin and Budapest, Prague and Vienna; cantors and composers experimented with new sounds. The modernist impulse from Felix Mendelssohn to Gustav Pick to Arnold Schoenberg and beyond became possible because of the ways music juxtaposed aesthetic and cultural differences.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references (pages 247-263) and index.
Bibliography noteDiscography: pages 265-266.
LCCN 2008003302
ISBN9780195178326 (alk. paper)
ISBN0195178327 (alk. paper)

Availability

Library Location Call Number Status Item Actions
Music Music Stacks ML3776 .B579 2008 ✔ Available Place Hold