Jewish music

Liner notes

Liner notes

A survey of the history and personalities of an ambitions pre-World War II attempt to create an institution that will document and promote Jewish music while moving the operations from an insecure Europe to Palestine. Based on the archives of the WCJM located at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, the book includes useful indices.

Focuses on liturgical traditions only. Uneven in its content and not without inaccuracies. Spanish translation available (Madrid: Akal 2002)

A general introduction geared to undergraduate college students offering a panoramic overview of the main issues of Jewish music for the uninitiated. Accompanied by a CD.

Written as a memoire of the musical encounters of the author, composer and conductor Lazare Saminsky (1882-1959), with Jewish communities in his homeland, the Russian Empire and elsewhere, the book is a document of the late Romantic Orientalistic views of Western intellectuals regarding the authenticity of Jewish music in the East.

A survey of Jewish music from Biblical times to the present that compiles a great amount of selective data without offering in-depth insights into the social context in which the music is created, performed, judged and consumed.

A programmatic article including a very valuable critique of most of definitions of Jewish music. It stresses the ambiguity of the concept of Jewish music as well as the racialized discourses related to it that developed after Richard Wagner.

Emphasizes the vastness of Jewish music in terms of time and place and therefore the impossibility of addressing it as a unified field.

Contrasts between the internal Jewish music narratives of continuity (“myths”) and the incompatible musical diversity that Jewish music shows (“realities”)