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Sonic Ruins of Modernity: Judeo-Spanish Folksongs Today. Edwin Seroussi. London: Routledge. 2023.
Reviewed by Lori Sen
A minority within the Jewish people, Sephardim are a triple diasporic population, who carried with them their culture, traditions, language (Judeo-Spanish), and oral literature. Judeo-Spanish folksongs are among the Sephardim’s oral literature and reflect the diverse influences of the many cultures they encountered throughout their five-hundred-year-long journey from medieval Iberia to all over the modern world. With Sonic Ruins of Modernity, musicologist Edwin Seroussi introduces the contemporary concept of folksong (in the post-tradition era) as a sonic ruin, regularly visited by tourists interested in exploring the history of other cultures.
Read the rest of this entry »The Milken Archive of Jewish Music: The American Experience
Vol. XVI: Heroes and Heroines: Jewish Opera
http://www.milkenarchive.org/volumes/view/16
Reviewed by Jeffrey Shandler
Editor’s Note: This essay represents the first in a series of reviews exploring the recently launched Milken Archive of Jewish Music: The American Experience, an online resource that incorporates and expands upon the Archive’s earlier CD series (published on the Naxos label from 2003-2006).
In the annals of Jewish music, is any genre as fraught as opera? In nineteenth-century Europe, this most elaborate of western art forms seduced and dazzled Jewish admirers from Theodor Herzl (whose visions of Zionism were inspired by Tannhäuser) to Emma Goldman (transfixed by a performance of Il Trovatore in Königsberg). The lure of opera for cantors became the stuff of legends (the story of Yoel-Dovid Strashunsky’s fall from grace when he abandoned the synagogue in Vilna for the opera house in Warsaw inspired works of fiction, theater, and film). Jewish opera composers became celebrities (Meyerbeer, Offenbach), and their musicianship the target of anti-Semitic attack (most famously, Wagner’s Das Judenthum in der Musik). Opera production has long been a familiar home for Jews who converted (Mahler), intermarried (Otto Goldschmidt, the husband of Jenny Lind), or obscured their Jewishness (Rudolph Bing). Is it any wonder that the most renowned opera whose central figures are European Jews, Halévy’s La Juive (1835), is named for a character who, it turns out as the final curtain is about to ring down, isn’t, in fact, a Jewess? Read the rest of this entry »
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