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Leone Sinigaglia 1868-1944: Spoliazione e Morte di un Compositore Ebreo Perseguitato dal Fascismo. Marco Fiorentino. Turin: Italy. Silvio Zamorani Editore. 2024.
Reviewed by Jesse Rosenberg
In the early twentieth century the Turinese composer Leone Sinigaglia reached a measure of popularity inside and outside of Italy mainly on the strength of a handful of instrumental works. He was also identified with research into folk songs of his native Piedmont region, which he came to know “from the mouth of the people” (as he claimed in the dedication of his folk song collection Vecchie Canzoni Popolar del Piemonte) during excursions into the countryside, and of which he published a number of arrangements. But the days when works such as his concert overture Le Baruffe Chiozzotte appeared on concert programs and radio broadcasts are long gone. In recent years the music of Sinigaglia has undergone a reappraisal, and a fair selection of his works has been recorded. A modest-sized monograph devoted to Sinigaglia appeared in 2012. [1] The reasons for this are not exclusively musical. The proportion is impossible to quantify with any precision, but at least part of this renewed interest is the fact that Sinigaglia was a victim of the Holocaust.
Read the rest of this entry »Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America. Eli Sperling. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 2024.
Reviewed by Inbar Shifrin
To a Jewish American, which anthem would hold greater importance: “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “HaTikvah?” According to Eli Sperling’s book Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America, the answer is both. One anthem affirms American patriotism, while the other represents a connection to Israel. This complex example illustrates the central question Sperling seeks to answer in his book: How did Hebrew songs play a role in fostering Zionism and a yearning for the land of Israel within American Jews without encouraging immigration to physically build Israel?
Read the rest of this entry »Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa. Christopher Silver. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2022.
Reviewed by Hugo Hadji
In Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa, Christopher Silver provides the first in-depth and comprehensive history of the North African music recording industry and scene from the dawn of the twentieth century to the early post-independence era. Guided by the premise that music and history are mutually constitutive, Silver offers to listen to the sounds and artists that shaped and reflected the identities of Jews and Muslims living in the Maghreb region during that period. Such work, Silver convincingly argues, “provides twentieth-century North Africa with a soundscape that dramatically alters its historiographical landscape” (13) and allows us to use music to explore Jewish-Muslim relationships, coexistence, and subjectivities outside of and challenging the typical frameworks of “majority-minority” power relations and the mass departure of Jews in the 1950s and 1960s dominant in the literature. It further allows us to acknowledge and recount the central place Jews held in the construction and development of the recording industry and popular musical scene in North Africa, as artists and as intermediaries.
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Musica Judaica Online Reviews 