7/27/2019 Music in Israel | Listening Guide | Week 8 (2013)

1/1

MUSIC 74&139: MUSIC IN ISRAEL WEEKLY LISTENING ASSIGNMENTS

Note: All required sound files and CD booklets available on bSpace.

Week 8

This week, we explore how Israeli composers express their relationship to Jewish history and to thehistory of Jewish music. How does new music confront ancient themes? How much past does it needto assert its independent identity? Is there a defined Israeli cultural agenda regarding (musical) history?

In very broad terms, Zionist cultural agendas that resulted in the creation of the State of Israel often tendto divide Jewish history in two parts. A long, turbulent past (2000 years of life in the Diaspora) came to

an end thanks to the saving force of Statehood. Yet, Israeli culture also seems to constantly need tomeasure itself in comparison with the high standards of Jewish creativity that evolved before itsexistence.

Composers Tsippi Fleischer (see an interview with her in R. Fleischer, Twenty Israeli Composers, ch.12, available on bSpace) and Noam Sheriff both wrote music that evokes life in the Diaspora as well asthe salvation derived from the creation of the State of Israel. For Fleischer, the paradigm derives fromthe 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The texts of her Oratorio 1492-1992 (1992) are mainlydrawn from Medieval Spanish Hebrew Poetry (all texts appear in the CD booklet). Sheriff draws uponthe Holocaust. His composition, Mechaye hametim (Revival of the Dead, 1985), comprises four complexsections, whose texts are based on the Hebrew Bible, but also on modern Israeli poetry and on anIsraeli folk song (from the SLI repertoire, see Regev-Seroussi and previous weeks assignments; you willagain find all texts in the CD booklet, on bSpace).

Their music is descriptive. You may want to focus on the texts (if so, find additional help in the anthologyedited by T. Carmi, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, which is available at the UC Berkeley Library),

but please do listen to the following tracks, and try to define what their sounds evoke in you:

Fleischer, Tsippi. Oratorio 1492-1992, in Music from Six Continents, Vienna Modern MastersVMM 3013, 1992, LCD 5868

Track 3: Of the Storm of ExpulsionTrack 5: Of the Return to Zion

Sheriff, Noam. Mechaye hametim (Revival o f the Dead), Signum SIG X110-00, 2000, LCD 5594

Track 1: Jewish Life in the DiasporaTrack 4: Revival and Renaissance

Another interesting theme is offered by the violin concertos composed by three Israeli authors: Paul

Ben-Haim, whose music we now know quite well; Noam Sheriff (see above); and Oded Zehavi (seeinterview with him in R. Fleischer, Twenty Israeli Composers, ch. 20, available on bSpace). In thesecompositions, each author confronts not only one of the central forms of European art music (theConcerto), but also an essential musical icon of Jewish culture: the violin (think of Chagall, of Fiddleron the Roof, of the long stream of successful East-European Jewish violinists). The followingmovements highlight the composers approach to the violin and its loaded cultural aura, but they alsoassert a very clear Israeli musical agenda, based on Mediterranean and especially Oriental themes(which we already began to explore in the previous weeks).

Israeli Violin Concertos (Paul Ben Haim 1960, Noam Sherif 1986, Oded Zehavi 1998), Living Era1038, 1998, LCD 5592

Track 2: Ben-Haim, Second movement:Andante affettuoso (1960)Track 5: Sheriff, Second movement:Allegro non troppo (1986)Track 8: Zehavi, Second movement:Andante (1998)

Other relevant items that you may want to listen to can be found in Zehavis Violin concertos othermovements. About eight minutes into the First movement, chimes can be heard, evoking a tollingchurch bell cutting through the desolation of a Christian village in war-torn Lebanon, heard by thecomposer during his military service in the Lebanon War. The Third movement is described by thecomposer as an oriental wedding with visitors from central Europe. (Note that you are not required tolisten to these other movements, but perhaps the themes behind them may be of interest to you!)