|
|
2009-10 SEASON
Our next event of the season: This event is FREE to the public.
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. "'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. ---------------------------------
Click here to view PDF - Complete list of presenters:
The Jewish Music Forum lecture/discussion series gratefully acknowledges the support of |
|
If you have difficulty viewing the buttons above, try updating your Java software.
|
