Leonard Bernstein in Context

November 22, 2024 in Book Review | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

Leonard Bernstein in Context. Edited by Elizabeth A. Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2024.

Reviewed by Zane Larson

Leonard Bernstein in Context, edited by Elizabeth A. Wells, is a new publication in the “Composers in Context” series from Cambridge University Press. It joins the company of texts covering canonical figures in the Western tradition such as Mozart, Mahler, and The Beatles. Thirty-six scholars examine wide-ranging topics in the cultural and political histories of Bernstein’s life and work, such as his Jewish upbringing, his involvement in civil rights, West Side Story, and his famed Young People’s Concerts. The collection provides readers with short and concise chapters attuned to the multi-faceted scholarly conversations surrounding Bernstein’s fame, well-documented life as a pianist, conductor, composer, educator, and cultural ambassador, and his ubiquity in musicological research.

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Kabbalachia by Basya Schechter and Shaul Magid

October 28, 2024 in Recording Review | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

Kabbalachia by Basya Schechter and Shaul Magid (2024)

Album review by Gabby Cameron

As the sun sets on a Friday evening over Fire Island, congregants gather at the Fire Island Synagogue to welcome Shabbat, donning their kippahs and tallit with shorts and sandals. What type of music might one hear in such a setting? Together, Cantor Basya Schechter and Rabbi Shaul Magid developed a localized musical tradition of setting Kabbalat Shabbat texts to Appalachian old-time music. Over the course of a decade, Kabbalachia was born. 

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For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age 

September 5, 2024 in Book Review | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age. Jessica Roda. New York, NY: New York University Press. 2024.

Reviewed by Miranda Crowdus

In this book, Jessica Roda explores a recently emergent phenomenon enabled to a large degree by the possibilities of the digital age. Roda explores Orthodox Jewish women’s musical and theatrical performances for women and by women, drawing on years of recent fieldwork including participant observation and in-depth interviews. Roda’s book is a holistic tour-de-force representing the networks, relationships, spaces and venues – human, digital, geospatial, and other – through which these performances are created, rehearsed, and broadcast. This investigation includes a sensitive and honest reflection on the author’s own positionality and enmeshment, not only within the communities and in relation to the individuals under focus but also more broadly to the state of belonging to the Jewish community and being a woman in North America in the twenty-first century. In these dense and detailed portrayals, the results of a wealth of engaged, detailed, and multifaceted fieldwork, the emergence of the kol isha (the voice of a woman) “industry” to its current proliferation, and rich descriptions of the women’s and others’ negotiations with halacha (Jewish law) are explored in detail. It should be noted that such negotiations are normative in Judaism across denominations. But, as the book clearly explains, what differentiates the Hasidic and Haredi communities is their adherence to the authority of the rebbe (or rabbi) in these negotiations. 

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Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler

August 19, 2024 in Book Review | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler. Michael Haas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2023.

Reviewed by Dr. Alexandra Birch

Michael Haas’s new book is an expansion of his earlier work on Forbidden Music: The Composers Banned by the Nazis (Yale University Press: 2013) critically reconsidering different modalities of “exile” and the impact of exile on musical composition. Rather than a simple look at only those composers who fled to the United States, Haas engages with larger issues in the historiography of the Holocaust, like the material and financial ability to flee, the change in the perceived danger of Hitler across the 1930s, and how far was far enough to escape the war. Haas also complicates our understanding of those composers who remained in Europe, addressing the spectrum of complicity that they employed in order to continue working in occupied Europe. One of the strengths of the book is Haas’s experience both in performance and the humanities, where he elegantly puts the aesthetics of music in dialogue with Nazi racial and political strictures, emphasizing that denunciation and danger could be on both fronts with “Jewish” music and or a Jewish racial identity. The writing about music never feels cumbersome and is accessible to historians and musicians alike. 

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This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity

August 1, 2024 in Book Review | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity. Edited by Oren Kroll-Zeldin and Ariella Werden-Greenfield. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. 2023.

Reviewed by Dr. Robert J Wuagneux

What is the connection between Phish and contemporary Jewish identity? Why does Phish have a disproportionately large Jewish fanbase? Editors Oren Kroll-Zeldin and Ariella Werden-Greenfield argue that the answer to these questions lies in a complex mosaic of religious and cultural ties that link Phish’s music and their fans’ complementary scene practices with Jewishness. Using a broad and inclusive understanding of Jewishness, this book counts all who identify as “Jewish” as Jews and all who identify as Phish fans as such.

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Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era

May 29, 2024 in Book Review | Tags: , , , , | by | Leave a comment

Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era. Jeremiah Lockwood. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 2024.

Reviewed by Matthew Austerklein 

Jeremiah Lockwood’s new book, Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers & Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era (University of California Press, 2024) is the culminating work of a determined and thoughtful advocate of cantorial music. The grandson of Cantor Jacob Konigsberg, Lockwood is a scholar-activist with a long history of academic achievement and musical creativity [1]. This new work continues that trajectory, combining a thorough study of cantors with hints of an emerging musical ideology. At the center of his groundbreaking book are the stories of a small group of Hasidic singers in Brooklyn who are reviving Golden Age cantorial music through performance and recording, all while negotiating their countercultural love of this expressive art form within the skeptical world of Hasidic Judaism and the largely pop-music ethos of the Orthodox synagogues in which they serve.

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La Memoria Cantata: A Survivor from Warsaw di Arnold Schönberg nell’Europa del dopoguerra

May 8, 2024 in Book Review | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

La Memoria Cantata: A Survivor from Warsaw di Arnold Schönberg nell’Europa del dopoguerra. Joy H. Calico. Edizione italiana a cura di Paolo Dal Molin, traduzione di Silvia Albesano. Milan: Il Saggiatore. 2023. 

Reviewed by Jesse Rosenberg

On the list of musical works inspired by the Shoah, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw has long held a special status. The realistic description of a roundup of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, the concluding choral Shema that constitutes one of the strongest testimonies of Schoenberg’s re-commitment to Judaism in the last two decades of his life, and the combination of advanced twelve-tone technique with Sprechstimme, one of the composer’s earliest innovations, unite to make a powerful impression on listeners to this day. In her 2014 monograph Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe, dedicated to the reception of this work, Joy H. Calico documents in detail the effect of this work on European critics and audiences, and subjects it to a thorough analysis. 

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“The Soul Seeks Its Melodies”: Music in Jewish Thought

May 6, 2024 in Book Review | Tags: , , , | by | 1 comment

“The Soul Seeks Its Melodies”: Music in Jewish Thought. Dov Schwartz. Translated by Batya Stein. Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press. 2022.

Reviewed by Aubrey L. Glazer

When we listen deeply to music, we realize the truth that “[e]very musical phenomenon points to something beyond itself by reminding us of something, contrasting itself with something or arousing our expectations.” [1] Such a reflection from German Jewish philosopher and pianist Theodor Adorno’s prolific musical thinking appears in a 1963 essay collected in the book Quasi Una Fantasia. Adorno was a prolific Jewish thinker who spent a lifetime reflecting on how music is itself a thought process by which content is defined “not because its particular elements express something symbolically” but through a paradoxical process of “distancing itself from language that its resemblance to language finds it fulfillment.” [2] To enter into the realm of analyzing music in Jewish thought, one would therefore expect these kinds of approaches to musical thinking to be engaged as a starting point. It is striking, then, to suggest that music can be a power to “communicate without words,” as Dov Schwartz concludes in his recent book “The Soul Seeks Its Melodies”: Music in Jewish Thought, writing that this is “one of the deepest meanings of music as a language” (299). The contrast between these distinct approaches to musical thinking and its language in Adorno and Schwartz would have been a natural starting point to fill an entire book. However, Adorno’s absence from this monograph reveals much about the foundations of Dov Schwartz’s philosophical approach. 

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The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies

March 4, 2024 in Book Review | Tags: , , , , , , | by | Leave a comment

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies. Edited by Tina Frühauf. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2023.

Reviewed by Paul G. Feller-Simmons

The publication of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies, edited by Tina Frühauf, marks a much-anticipated milestone. Released in November of 2023, the weighty tome attests to the rapidly changing landscape of the field, offering a comprehensive exploration of manifold subjects. With twenty-nine chapters plus an introduction penned by scholars at various stages of their careers, the Handbook truly mirrors the best facets of the field’s current state. While it would be a daunting task to do justice to every chapter within the confines of this review, particularly for an avowed early modernist such as myself, it suffices to say that the volume exudes scholarly rigor and innovation.

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City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem

February 4, 2024 in Book Review | Tags: , , , , , | by | Leave a comment

City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem. Michael A. Figueroa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022.

Reviewed by Tanya Sermer

Michael A. Figueroa’s captivating City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem is a book about Jerusalems—high/low, celestial/terrestrial, metaphorical/material—and how musical representations of the city have produced a multiplicity of political imaginaries about those Jerusalems in modernity. Combining an impressive array of interdisciplinary theory, historical and archival study, ethnographic fieldwork, and close listening to songs in Hebrew about the city, Figueroa creates a sophisticated framework for understanding how music and poetry (from the Psalms through Israeli popular song of the 1970s) have been used to create subjective and changing “spatial knowledge” about Jerusalem among Zionist Jews and Israelis over the course of the twentieth century. Presenting a remarkably nuanced exploration of the contested meanings inherent in cultural output regarding the city, Figueroa is deliberate in his relational approach to the people and spaces in his study; discussions of Jerusalem throughout the book consider the perspectives and concerns of Palestinian Arabs, Armenians, or ethnic and religious divisions within the Jewish and Israeli populations. Figueroa’s commitment to a relational approach—a growing body of such scholarship in musical studies of Israel and Palestine that aims to break down the mutual exclusion of those two national narratives as well as the conventional dichotomies within them—offers the reader a rich picture of the social and political forces at play and the greater implications of the territorial imaginaries that underpin the songs Figueroa examines. 

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