March 22, 2010
Wolpe Lectures from Jewish Music Forum
March 26, 201010:30 A.M.
Center for Jewish History 15 West 16th Street
New York, NY
All events are FREE and open to the public.
Friday, March 26, 2010, at the Center for Jewish History, Dr. Brigid Cohen will present a lecture entitled "'In a Land Large as an Apple Tree': Wolpe's Avant-Garde Music, Pedagogy, and Pacifist Zionism in 1930's Palestine" and Prof. Michael Beckerman of NYU will contribute a written response.
The Jewish Music Forum, now in its sixth season, is a project of The American Society for Jewish Music, with support from The American Jewish Historical Society. Please visit our website at www.jewishmusicforum.org.
"'In a Land Large as an Apple Tree': Wolpe's Avant-Garde Music, Pedagogy, and Pacifist Zionism in 1930's Palestine" Dr. Brigid Cohen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Respondent: Prof. Michael Beckerman, New York University Moderator: Prof. Stephen Blum, CUNY Graduate Center
"'In a Land Large as an Apple Tree': Wolpe's Avant-Garde Music, Pedagogy, and Pacifist Zionism in 1930's Palestine" In 1938, the German-Jewish composer Stefan Wolpe, spokesman for Jerusalem's nascent avant-garde and the kibbutz scene, delivered a provocative series of lectures at the World Center for Jewish Music in Jerusalem, in which he advocated a sweeping plan for cross-cultural music education across the Mandate of Palestine. Conceived with an acute sense of political urgency, during the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, on the eve of World War II, the dimensions of his proposal were staggering. Wolpe envisioned a corps of "flying" instructors to teach the musics of "different peoples" and diverse compositional techniques across Jewish settlements; he advocated hiring "master-practitioners" of non-Western musics at the Palestine Conservatory; he suggested enlisting the Palestine Broadcasting Service to help record Jewish and non-Jewish musical traditions world-wide; he advocated the promotion of comparative musicologist Robert Lachmann at Hebrew University; and he proposed a national conference to debate the implications of appropriating "folklore" in Western notated composition. Drawing from existing literature (Bohlman, Hirshberg, Katz, Seroussi, von der Lühe), interviews, and new archival sources, this talk situates Wolpe's proposals in the context of wider debates within the Yishuv about the role of musical culture in nation-building. A veteran of intensely idealistic movements including the Bauhaus and Berlin agitprop, Wolpe envisioned the preservation of a heterogeneous Jewish musical heritage as going hand-in-hand with improving Arab-Jewish cultural understanding. His ambitious proposals provide insight into cultural-political contestations affecting many sectors of musical life in Palestine, marking a moment when cross-cultural education was seen as vital to national survival and reconciliation.
Dr. Brigid Cohen is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2007. Her research focuses on musical avant-gardes, postcolonial studies, migration and diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and intersections of music, the visual arts, and literature. Her current book project, Modernism Untethered: Wolpe, Music, and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. This work is both a study of the émigré composer Stefan Wolpe and a critical history of modernism that explores how experiences of migration shaped avant-garde communities from the Bauhaus to bebop to Black Mountain College. Her research has been supported by the Paul Sacher Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Getty Research Institute, the Mellon Foundation, and the Harvard Center for European Studies. In 2007-2008, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities.
Prof. Michael Beckerman is Professor of Music at New York University.
Prof. Stephen Blum joined the CUNY Graduate Center faculty in 1987, when the concentration in ethnomusicology was initiated. He has published several articles, books, and encyclopedia articles on general topics (composition, improvisation, music analysis, modern music history, cultural exchange) and on specific musical practices of Iran, Kurdistan, Central Asia, Europe, and North America. He has been active in the Society for Ethnomusicology and currently serves on the editorial boards of the British Journal for Ethnomusicology and the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
The Jewish Music Forum is an organization devoted to the study of music in Jewish life in all of its historical and contemporary diversity. Founded in the fall of 2004 under the auspices of the American Society for Jewish Music, with the support of the American Jewish Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History, the Jewish Music Forum seeks to provide a thriving habitat for interdisciplinary dialogue and scholarly exchange in the growing academic field of Jewish musical studies as well as a critical intellectual resource for specialists across a spectrum that includes cantors, composers, performers, students, educators, artistic directors, journalists, and others from the fields of musicology, anthropology, literature, Jewish studies, and American studies. By linking together members of these communities, the Forum serves as an academic professional network and intellectual resource for all who are interested in the role of music in Jewish life.
Posted by jmwc at March 22, 2010 10:43 AM