After Hebrewism

• In Event: Jewish Music: Engaging with the Past, Looking into the Future

Abstract

Eight decades of art music in British Palestine and Israel have exhausted the territorial paradigms of Hebrew culture. Musical earmarks that facilitated the mutuality of citation and identity have been replaced with dialectical returns to exilic Jewish cultures whose non-territorial aspects now threaten contemporary political anxieties that seek to instill territorial nationalism.

Contemporary compositional practices are no longer interested in grappling with national topoi, as many composers have de facto muted such soundboards while opting for the elasticity of Jewish and non-Jewish ethnographic spaces. Drawing on the non-objectified (read, non-exotic) features of those spaces, composers managed to reverse the Zionist universalization of the diaspora as well as the its management of Jewish history.

Such Aesthetic shifts toward Jewish exilic cultures and non-territorislism signal a new modernist turn whereby contemporary “semionauts” (Nicolas Bourriaud’s term) forgo theoretical and syntactic innovations in favor of expanding existing sign systems. In so doing they anticipate the creolization of Jewish art music.

The talk seeks to assess these cultural transitions in light of the demise of Hebrew culture and its identity politics—and reassess the history and historiography of twentieth and twenty first century Jewish art music.

Author

• Assaf Shelleg, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem