Download or read book Jewish Music written by Abraham Zebi Idelsohn and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this landmark of musical scholarship, the leading 20th-century authority on Jewish music describes and analyzes its elements and characteristics, and chronicles its development from the earliest appearance of Semitic song 2000 years ago to the early 20th century. Liberally illustrating every type of music discussed, the book examines the music as a tonal expression of Judaism, Jewish life and the spiritual aspects of Jewish culture.
Download or read book The Music Libel Against the Jews written by Ruth HaCohen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This deeply imaginative and wide-ranging book shows how, since the first centuries of the Christian era, gentiles have associated Jews with noise. Ruth HaCohen focuses her study on a "musical libel"--a variation on the Passion story that recurs in various forms and cultures in which an innocent Christian boy is killed by a Jew in order to silence his "harmonious musicality." In paying close attention to how and where this libel surfaces, HaCohen covers a wide swath of western cultural history, showing how entrenched aesthetic-theological assumptions have persistently defined European culture and its internal moral and political orientations.Ruth HaCohen combines in her comprehensive analysis the perspectives of musicology, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, tracing the tensions between Jewish "noise" and idealized Christian "harmony" and their artistic manifestations from the high Middle Ages through Nazi Germany and beyond. She concludes her book with a passionate and moving argument for humanizing contemporary soundspaces.
Download or read book Jewry in Music written by David Conway and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Conway analyses why and how Jews, virtually absent from Western art music until the end of the eighteenth century, came to be represented in all branches of the profession within fifty years as leading figures – not only as composers and performers, but as publishers, impresarios and critics. His study places this process in the context of dynamic economic, political, sociological and technological changes and also of developments in Jewish communities and the Jewish religion itself, in the major cultural centres of Western Europe. Beginning with a review of attitudes to Jews in the arts and an assessment of Jewish music and musical skills, in the age of the Enlightenment, Conway traces the story of growing Jewish involvement with music through the biographies of the famous, the neglected and the forgotten, leading to a radical contextualisation of Wagner's infamous 'Judaism in Music'.
Download or read book The Sound of Hope written by Kellie D. Brown and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since ancient times, music has demonstrated the incomparable ability to touch and resonate with the human spirit as a tool for communication, emotional expression, and as a medium of cultural identity. During World War II, Nazi leadership recognized the power of music and chose to harness it with malevolence, using its power to push their own agenda and systematically stripping it away from the Jewish people and other populations they sought to disempower. But music also emerged as a counterpoint to this hate, withstanding Nazi attempts to exploit or silence it. Artistic expression triumphed under oppressive regimes elsewhere as well, including the horrific siege of Leningrad and in Japanese internment camps in the Pacific. The oppressed stubbornly clung to music, wherever and however they could, to preserve their culture, to uplift the human spirit and to triumph over oppression, even amid incredible tragedy and suffering. This volume draws together the musical connections and individual stories from this tragic time through scholarly literature, diaries, letters, memoirs, compositions, and art pieces. Collectively, they bear witness to the power of music and offer a reminder to humanity of the imperative each faces to not only remember, but to prevent another such cataclysm.
Download or read book Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy written by Lynette Bowring and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought. An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture. Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.
Download or read book Rock n Roll Jews written by Michael Billig and published by Five Leaves Publications. This book was released on 2000 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A disciplined study that reveals the many contributions of Jews throughout the history of rock 'n' roll.
Download or read book Jews Race and Popular Music written by Jon Stratton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jon Stratton provides a pioneering work on Jews as a racialized group in the popular music of America, Britain and Australia during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than taking a narrative, historical approach the book consists of a number of case studies, looking at the American, British and Australian music industries. Stratton's primary motivation is to uncover how the racialized positioning of Jews, which was sometimes similar but often different in each of the societies under consideration, affected the kinds of music with which Jews have become involved. Stratton explores race as a cultural construction and continues discussions undertaken in Jewish Studies concerning the racialization of the Jews and the stereotyping of Jews in order to present an in-depth and critical understanding of Jews, race and popular music.
Download or read book Judaism in Music and Other Essays written by Richard Wagner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical genius, polemicist, explosive personality-that was the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, who paid as much attention to his reputation as to his genius. Often maddening, and sometimes called mad, Wagner wrote with the same intensity that characterized his music. The letters and essays collected in Judaism in Music and Other Essays were published during the 1850s and 1860s, the period when he was chiefly occupied with the creation of The Ring of the Nibelung. Highlighting this collection is the notorious 1850 article "Judaism in Music, " which caused such a firestorm that nearly twenty years later Wagner published an unapologetic appendix. Other prose pieces include "On the Performing of Tannhauser, " written while he was in political exile; "On Musical Criticism, " an appeal for a more vital approach to art undivorced from life; and "Music of the Future." This volume concludes with letters to friends about the intent and performance of his great operas; estimations of Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, and others; and suggestions for the reform of opera houses in Vienna, Paris, and Zurich. The Bison Book edition includes the full text of volume 3 of William Ashton Ellis's 1894 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.
Download or read book Forbidden Music written by Michael Haas and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany’s historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment. /div
Download or read book Genius Anxiety written by Norman Lebrecht and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively chronicle of the years 1847–1947—the century when the Jewish people changed how we see the world—is “[a] thrilling and tragic history…especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past” (The Wall Street Journal). In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847, the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why? Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent, beautifully designed volume is “an urgent and moving history” (The Spectator, UK) and a celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.
Download or read book Jews and Jazz written by Charles B Hersch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity explores the meaning of Jewish involvement in the world of American jazz. It focuses on the ways prominent jazz musicians like Stan Getz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Lee Konitz, Dave Liebman, Michael Brecker, and Red Rodney have engaged with jazz in order to explore and construct ethnic identities. The author looks at Jewish identity through jazz in the context of the surrounding American culture, believing that American Jews have used jazz to construct three kinds of identities: to become more American, to emphasize their minority outsider status, and to become more Jewish. From the beginning, Jewish musicians have used jazz for all three of these purposes, but the emphasis has shifted over time. In the 1920s and 1930s, when Jews were seen as foreign, Jews used jazz to make a more inclusive America, for themselves and for blacks, establishing their American identity. Beginning in the 1940s, as Jews became more accepted into the mainstream, they used jazz to "re-minoritize" and avoid over-assimilation through identification with African Americans. Finally, starting in the 1960s as ethnic assertion became more predominant in America, Jews have used jazz to explore and advance their identities as Jews in a multicultural society.
Download or read book Exile Music written by Jennifer Steil and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "novel based on an unexplored slice of World War II history, following a young Jewish girl whose family flees refined and urbane Vienna for safe harbor in the mountains of Bolivia"--
Download or read book Making Americans written by Andrea Most and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1925 to 1951--three chaotic decades of depression, war, and social upheaval--Jewish writers brought to the musical stage a powerfully appealing vision of America fashioned through song and dance. It was an optimistic, meritocratic, selectively inclusive America in which Jews could at once lose and find themselves--assimilation enacted onstage and off, as Andrea Most shows. This book examines two interwoven narratives crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture: the stories of Jewish acculturation and of the development of the American musical. Here we delve into the work of the most influential artists of the genre during the years surrounding World War II--Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Dorothy and Herbert Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, and Richard Rodgers--and encounter new interpretations of classics such as The Jazz Singer, Whoopee, Girl Crazy, Babes in Arms, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, and The King and I. Most's analysis reveals how these brilliant composers, librettists, and performers transformed the experience of New York Jews into the grand, even sacred acts of being American. Read in the context of memoirs, correspondence, production designs, photographs, and newspaper clippings, the Broadway musical clearly emerges as a form by which Jewish artists negotiated their entrance into secular American society. In this book we see how the communities these musicals invented and the anthems they popularized constructed a vision of America that fostered self-understanding as the nation became a global power.
Download or read book A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany written by Lily E. Hirsch and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Offers a clear introduction to a fascinating, yet little known, phenomenon in Nazi Germany, whose very existence will be a surprise to the general public and to historians. Easily blending general history with musicology, the book provides provocative yet compelling analysis of complex issues." ---Michael Meyer, author of The Politics of Music in the Third Reich "Hirsch poses complex questions about Jewish identity and Jewish music, and she situates these against a political background vexed by the impossibility of truly viable responses to such questions. Her thorough archival research is complemented by her extensive use of interviews, which gives voice to those swept up in the Holocaust. A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany is a book filled with the stories of real lives, a collective biography in modern music history that must no longer remain in silence." ---Philip V. Bohlman, author of Jewish Music and Modernity "An engaging and downright gripping history. The project is original, the research is outstanding, and the presentation lucid." ---Karen Painter, author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 The Jewish Culture League was created in Berlin in June 1933, the only organization in Nazi Germany in which Jews were not only allowed but encouraged to participate in music, both as performers and as audience members. Lily E. Hirsch's A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany is the first book to seriously investigate and parse the complicated questions the existence of this unique organization raised, such as why the Nazis would promote Jewish music when, in the rest of Germany, it was banned. The government's insistence that the League perform only Jewish music also presented the organization's leaders and membership with perplexing conundrums: what exactly is Jewish music? Who qualifies as a Jewish composer? And, if it is true that the Nazis conceived of the League as a propaganda tool, did Jewish participation in its activities amount to collaboration? Lily E. Hirsch is Assistant Professor of Music at Cleveland State University.
Download or read book Judaism in Music written by Richard Wagner and published by Blurb. This book was released on 2019-01-09 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famous "Ring" Trilogy composer Richard Wagner argues in this essay that Jewish involvement in European culture always had a negative and distorting impact. Jews, Wagner wrote, did not have the European "folkish soul" required to create genuinely European art, and, as a result, were only imitators who crassly deformed all that they produced. As a result, he said, all art-be it musical or otherwise-from Jewish sources was always shallow and a mockery of true art. Along the way, he discusses the Jewish type, and their broader influence in society. First published in 1850, "Judaism in Music" created a storm which forever earned him the hatred of the Jewish lobby in Germany and elsewhere. Originally issued under a pseudonym, Wagner republished the book in 1869, along with a supplement, under his own name. In the supplement, Wagner discusses the reaction to the original essay's publication, and goes on to discuss how the Jews controlled the major newspapers and theaters of his day, and how the media turned against him after the 1850 essay saw the light of day. This edition also contains Wagner's 1878 essay "What is German," which contains further remarks on Jewish activities within Germany.
Download or read book Beethoven s Anvil written by William Benzon and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ¿7FWhy does the brain create music? This text argues that the key to music's function lies in the very complexity of musical experience. As well as being both personal and social, the creation of music taps into the whole spectrum of human skills, both physical and mental."
Download or read book A Right to Sing the Blues written by Jeffrey Melnick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers just such a revision. Black-Jewish relations, Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made Black music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their natural affinity for producing Black music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness. Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.
