Mixing Musics: Istanbul Jews and Their Sacred Songs

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

This musical performance/talk by virtuoso oud player Münir Beken and research scholar Maureen Jackson explores the Jewish religious repertoire of the Maftirim, music that translates into Jewish religious space the forms and performance practices of Ottoman court music. The program interweaves musical performance, archival recordings, visual enhancements, and explanatory interludes to illuminate the cultural and social cross-fertilizations that generated the music. It highlights musicological commonalities between Ottoman Jewish composers and their non-Jewish counterparts in the areas of improvisation, musical genres, and performance practice. For example, some Maftirim pieces were adapted from non-Jewish Ottoman compositions: we will hear the original composition on the oud alongside the Hebrew religious song sung by master Istanbul cantors on film and recordings. As well, the program elucidates the social dimension of musical interactivity through tracing the urban circulations of Jewish composers and presenting their compositions. Assumed to have died out by the mid-twentieth century, the Maftirim repertoire in fact continues today in a synagogue in central Istanbul. Drawing upon new ethnographic research, the program elucidates the overlooked but ongoing relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish composers in an era of nation-building – relationships that were partially responsible for the continuation not only of Maftirim music but also Ottoman-Turkish music in general under Europeanizing cultural reforms in Turkey. The program concludes with a mixed suite of both Jewish and non-Jewish twentieth century composers to bring to life the music generated by these ongoing social and musical relationships. A discussant, ethnomusicologist Mark Kligman, will bring a comparative perspective on the Ottoman Jewish music through his research on Syrian Jewish religious music in diaspora in Brooklyn.

Sub Unit

• Sephardi/Mizrahi Studies

Moderator

• Maureen Barbara Jackson, University of Washington

Discussants

• Mark Loren Kligman, University of California, Los Angeles

• Devi Mays, University of Michigan

• Munir Beken, University of California, Los Angeles