Hearing Israel: Music, Culture, and History at 60

Israeli music legend Etti Ankri performs at Hearing Israel, April 13, 2008
Photograph by Nichole Haake

On April 13-14, 2008, approximately 150 leading Israeli, North American, and European scholars gathered at UVA in honor of the 60th anniversary of Israel’s statehood for an historic international academic conference titled “Hearing Israel: Music, Culture, and History at 60,” organized by Joel Rubin, Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Music Performance, and James Loeffler, Assistant Professor of History. 

The conference, which was open to the public, included presentations on a wide variety of topics, spanning many musical genres, historical periods, and sectors of the Israeli population. Participants explored music as a window into national identity, politics, religion, and culture in Israel. Despite its short history, Israel is the home to a wide variety of musical styles, bringing together Eastern and Western, classical and contemporary traditions. Some of the subjects covered by the conference included Israeli art music, hip hop, electric guitar, a revival of vernacular “Cochini” women’s songs of the Jews of India in Israel, the relationship between popular Israeli and Italian music, the politics of Palestinian-Israeli music, and postmodernism in Israeli music. Over the course of the two days, participants considered the socio-political-economic-religious implications and motivations for the production of music, highlighting the intersections between art and individual and national identity.
 
One of the central ideas of the conference was the relationship between the origin of the music and the identity of its performers. The identity of the person playing the music is as important as the music itself in conveying meaning. In a culturally diverse country with many people from immigrant backgrounds, Israeli musicians are exposed to many different styles of musical performance. However, the identity politics surrounding the music make it difficult, for instance, for a Jewish performer from a European background to “authentically” perform a piece that is of Arabic origin, as he may be seen as appropriating the cultural property of another group. Groups of performers of Palestinian and Jewish backgrounds who perform together music that is a fusion of Eastern and Western traditions are conveying a political message of peace both in the music and through their joining together as a group. When musicians who are not of the dominant European Jewish background play the music of their own traditions, they exhibit ethnic pride and defiance of a national narrative that ignores Israel’s ethno-racial diversity. When classical Israeli composers of the past adopted “Oriental” sounds into their Western art music, they used music as a medium to declare the Jewish story as one that is rooted in the Middle East. Each of these examples illustrates the complex nature of Israeli music and performance.

The conference’s keynote address, “Approaching the Music of Israel: Processes, Identities and Experiences,” was given by Professor Edwin Seroussi, Emanuel Alexandre Professor of Musicology, Chairman of the Musicology Department and Director of the Jewish Music Research Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, along with presentations by Nissim Calderon (Ben Gurion University), Motti Regev (Open University of Israel), Benjamin Brinner (University of California, Berkeley), Jehoash Hirshberg (Hebrew University), Barbara Johnson (Ithaca College), and others. The conference was the first in the United States-–and possibly the world-–devoted specifically to the music of Israel.

Alongside the academic sessions, the conference also featured concert performances by Israeli musical legends Etti Ankri and Moussa Berlin as well as cellist Uri Vardi and the Charlottesville and University Symphony Orchestra. The concerts illustrated the complexity of Israeli music, bringing together contemporary Israeli pop, the East European Jewish klezmer and hasidic traditions, and classical works by works by Bloch and Golijov. These musical performances offered an opportunity for the broader Charlottesville community to become involved in the conference, and were well attended by students and community members.

Rubin and Loeffler are in the process of editing the conference proceedings, which will be published by Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology, a peer-reviewed online journal.