The course, Music in Israel (MUS 139, and MUS 74), will return to the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Music, in the Fall. Last time around, the course was quite a success. It included lively discussions, tons of musical examples, guest lecturers, Skype guests from around the world, live performances, and, of course, the #Unfinal.
Next Wednesday, our Final Examination will be held at The Magnes from 11:30 until 2:30.
Attendance is mandatory. No exceptions.
As discussed in class, the Final for Music in Israel will follow the “unconference” format, which requires active participation from everyone.
Participants (that’s you!) will choose the content of the discussion by suggesting possible topics, creating a schedule, attending and participating in the discussion sessions, and helping with a plenary conclusive session.
In order to be prepared for the final you will need to take a look at the following links:
You can bring ANYTHING you wish to the Final. Laptops, smartphones, tablets, books, notes, post-it’s, puppets, musical instruments, other instruments… Really, anything that you think will help you.
The draft of the schedule is available at http://bit.ly/unfinal2012 and you can already add your proposed topics to it.
You are expected to contribute to the discussion by:
Proposing discussion topics (sessions) in the initial Session Marketplace and create a Schedule
Attending a total of 3 sessions based on your interests (up to 4 different sessions will take place at the same time in the auditorium, conference room and seminar room of The Magnes)
Participate in the discussions you are attending
Contribute to the plenary concluding session
All topics are acceptable. Those pertaining to the course are preferred, since this is what brought all of us together, but you may also come up with different ideas and, if enough students want to participate, that’s good too.
Personally, I’m interested in sessions that complete what the course had to offer during the semester. It is a chance to provide your fellow students (and the instructor) with critical feedback, suggestions on how to improve the learning experience, ideas on new materials, your own views on a specific topic, etc.
The Final (or the “unfinal” as we have been referring to in class) will only be as good as the content we inject into it.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to email me, as usual.
A group of students of Music in Israel devoted their class project to mapping the relationship between popular music and military conflicts in Israel since 1948.
It’s hard to believe that it’s that time of the year already…
This week, we wrap up the semester with a surprise guest, some concluding presentations by students, and an Israeli Folk Dance Workshop taught by students.
On Tuesday, we will hear several presentations focusing on popular music, from rock to songs that reflect the history of Israel’s military conflicts. We will also spend some time preparing for the upcoming final examination (aka, the “unfinal”).
On Thursday, our “Skype guest” will be dr. Edwin Seroussi, professor of musicology and director of the Jewish Music Research Center at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a leading authority on Jewish music and on music in Israel, and the co-author of one of the textbooks we read this semester. He was also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley in 2010, when he taught a course on the Intersection of Judaism and Islam in Music. Edwin’s appearance in class is an excellent way to summarize what we have learned thus far, and to chart how the conversation could develop further. (Hint: also, an excellent way to prepare for the unfinal).
Our concluding act will be a student-led workshop devoted to Israeli folk dances (riqudey ‘am), one of the keystones of national culture in Israel. Since during the semester we’ve often been practicing the rather unforgiving (but oh, so rewarding) task of listening to songs’ music and not to their lyrics, it only seems fit to introduce dance without music. See how folk dances are portrayed in historical film footage taken in the street of Haifa in the 1950′s (from the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive of The Hebrew University).
P.S.: Edwin Seroussi is not the surprise guest (or, at least, not the only one) this week…
This year on Independence Day – the annual day of celebration that follows yom hazikharon, a remembrance day for those fallen in Israel’s many wars and conflicts, which we have studied in musical terms in the course of the semester – the State of Israel turns 64.
We are marking this day by taking a look at the significance of music in Israel beyond its (often contested) geographical borders, and we tune into its Jazz scene, a scene that has now been marketed for some time well beyond Israel itself. We discussed this several weeks ago with our “Skype guest,” Yoram Morad.
We are pleased to welcome to class guitarist Gilad Hekselman. Gilad is in the Bay Area for the Israeli JazzFest , which is taking place this week as part of SFJAZZ.
Gilad Hekselman is a remarkable young guitarist who has recorded and performed with a host of established jazz veterans including Chris Potter, John Scofield, Gretchen Parlato, Aaron Parks, Sam Yahel and Jeff “Tain” Watts. He won the 2005 Gibson Montreaux International Guitar Competition and has issued three outstanding recordings, including 2011’s Hearts Wide Open, which was selected by The New York Times as one of the best jazz releases of the year.
A new publication on Israel’s Army Radio just came out that reflects some of the topics discussed in class was just announced in the Israel Studies Bulletin Board:
Soffer, Oren. “The Anomaly of Galei Tzahal: Israel’s Army Radio as a Cultural Vanguard and Force for Pluralism.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 32.2 (2012): 225-243.
Israel’s Army Radio (Galei Tzahal) has been broadcasting for sixty years. Unlike military stations around the world, Galei Tzahal has always transmitted from the centre of the country, with programming aimed at the civilian population. This article examines how Galei Tzahal became a leading force in Israeli broadcasting and news coverage. Among other points, the article explores how military broadcasts, which are ostensibly foreign to the democratic experience, have become a symbol of pluralism, journalistic freedom, and the social and cultural avant-garde in Israel.
Author biography
Oren Soffer is a Senior Lecturer and the Head of Communication Studies at The Open University of Israel. He is currently a visiting scholar at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program. He is author of There Is No Place for Pilpul! Hatzefira Journal and the Modernization of Sociopolitical Discourse (Jerusalem, Mossad Bialik Press, 2007) and Mass Communication in Israel (Raanana, The Open University of Israel, 2011). His articles have been published in journals such as Communication Theory (2010; 2005); Journal of Israeli History (2010); Journalism (2009); Media History (2009); and Media Culture & Society (2008).
Hold on. This is going to be a bit long. But also, hopefully, quite fun, especially at the end. (Just skip there if you wish).
But first, here are some ideas about taking risks:
In this class we have discussed, over and over, about identity and its musical representations in Israel (and in Jewish culture, inasmuch as the two are related). As we have seen, identity is not a one way street, and is instead a process resulting from the dynamic interaction of diverse factors. How this interaction is represented, and performed, is key in our musical discourse.
Our textbook, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, as we have seen, frames the conversation in terms of (variants of) “Israeliness,” or “the intricate web of contrasting human factors, backgrounds, memories, ideologies, and wills that shaped Israeli society and its modern culture [...].”
One major point in this book is that Israeli national identity is not inherent in the specific sonic structures of the music perceived by Israelis as “Israeli” or as connoting “Israeliness.” There is, rather, an accumulated collection of items in diverse musical styles that over time and at specific historical and social junctures of Israeli existence acquired the signification of one or more variants of Israeliness. Our ethnographically oriented work thus tries to offer a pragmatic theory of how music can represent national identity. [...]
Initially, in the formative period— the prestate Yishuv period (Yishuv, or settlement, is the term commonly used to denote the autonomous Jewish community in Palestine before 1948)—and the first ten to fifteen years of statehood, until approximately 1960, this logic resulted in the successful invention and public imposition of a dominant cultural package known as “Hebrew culture” (tarbut `ivrit). In subsequent decades, Hebrewism was challenged by emerging variants of Israeliness. Most prominent of these were what we call “globalized Israeliness,” which embodied a mixture of Hebrewism and the effects of the globalization of culture, and the variant known in Israeli public culture as “oriental Israeliness” (Israeliyut mizrachit or mizrachiyut), in which Israelis of oriental origin— that is, originally from Arab and Muslim countries— insisted on the Israeliness of their specific cultural hybrid. Additional variants such as “Religious Israeliness” and one that can awkwardly be termed “Palestinian Israeliness” (or “Israeli Palestinianness”) also emerged as self-proclaimed contenders for the definition of Israeliness. (pages vii, 7, and 16).
According to the authors (Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi), “Israeliness” is thus manifested in several variants, which may not mutually exclusive but that are in opposition with one another (and especially with the first, Hebrewism):
Hebrewism (‘ivriut): traditional Israeliness
Globalized Israeliness
Mizrachiyut (Orientalism): Ethnic Israeliness
Religious Israeliness
Israeli Palestinianness/Palestinian Israeliness
Two additional models emerged in class, and revealed themselves to be particularly useful.
One model was explored thanks to the visit and lecture by Ben Brinner.
Brinner defined Israeli cultural identity for us in class in the context of his investigation of Israeli-Palestinian musical encounters he researched for his book, Playing Across a Divide, as an identiplexcomprising the following dimensions:
Citizenship (Israeli, Jordanian, Palestinian)
Country of origin or descent
Ethnicity (Arab, Bedouin, Jewish)
Socioeconomic status (age, gender, income)
Religious affiliation (Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druse, other)
Education
Musical training & experience
Another model, which I presented in class, envisions (musical) representations of identity not as the dynamic combination of exactly identifiable factors, but as the interpolation of dynamically ever-changing factors.
Essentially, the idea is that identity — especially its musical (or other) representations — is always multi-dimensional in each and everyone of its aspects. It does not fit in the paradigm of lists, charts, and variants, and cannot be categorized by fulfilling predetermined criteria (and filling preassigned check-boxes).
We explored this in terms of both Jewish and Israeli identity, each with its own layers of multi-dimensionality, and referred to an inspiring way of defining identity posited in the genderbread personconcept map I found here.
This map expresses the various aspects of (gender) identity through sliders rather than via binary or exclusive opposites. It highlights four identifiers relating to gender:
Gender identity (sliding from woman to man)
Gender expression (sliding from feminine to masculine)
Biological sex (sliding from male to female)
Sexual orientation (sliding from heterosexual to homosexual)
Make sure not to mis-read what I am suggesting here. I am not saying that gender identity can be used as a paradigm for the performance of Jewish and Israeli identities. Instead, I am pointing at a very interesting, and useful feature, that the concept map of the “genderbread person” (which emerged from a context that discusses gender identity) seems to put at the forefront. What the map does is suggest that identity identifiers are not mutually exclusive, are not “either-or’s,” and that they can vary from case to case.
If we transpose the map to our examination of how cultural identity is expressed/performed through music in Israel, we can soon see that the identifiers at play within this context are exactly the ones the authors quoted above pointed us to: traditional, globalized, ethnic, religious, and Palestinian Israeli identities (Regev and Seroussi), as well as citizenship, country of origin, socioeconomic status and education (Brinner).
These identifiers are never one-dimensional. They each coexist in a myriad of inner variables. And music, at times more than verbal language, can channel many of such variables.
Therefore, if you simply substitute the classifications in the genderbread person diagram with any of the terms identified by the authors mentioned above, positioning each of them on a slider, then.. tah-dah, you may start approximating what identity and its representations look like, feel like, and how they act out in real life.
Or, ditch all of the above and come to class on Tuesday, April 24, and meet our distinguished lecturer/presenter, playwright, comedian, and juggler extraordinaire, Sara Felder.
Sara began performing in 1984 with San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus. She has also toured with Jugglers for Peace in Cuba, the Women’s Circus in Nicaragua, Joel Grey’s Borscht Capades and at Festivals of Jewish/Yiddish Culture in Berlin, London, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles and Toronto. Through juggling, she has been able to find her theatrical voice, create compelling performance, teach alternative populations and pursue social justice.
Sara’s body of work, including radical solo circus theater and witty multi-actor plays, explores political and social frictions: a lone cellist playing defiantly on the war-ravaged streets of Sarajevo; the scientists who – in a gargantuan effort to save the world from Hitler – ended up making the bombs that annihilated the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a gender-bending cross-dressing 19th-century vaudevillian; two urban neighbors who confront racism; victims of radioactive fallout from U.S. nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands; and women named Joan.
A Bay Area resident, Sara Felder juggles her Jewish and gender identities in text and body language. Her play, Out of Sight, a solo comedy, “brings circus tricks, shadow puppets and a Jewish queer sensibility to questions of family loyalty and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Out of Sight explicitly evokes Israeli music through dance, and prominently features horah mamterah (“horah of the sprinkler,” a song about irrigating the Negev Desert; lyrics by the Polish-born Israeli Hebrew poet, Yechiel Mohar, 1921-1969, found here and here). A classic Song of the Land of Israel (SLI) composed by Moshe Wilenksy (b. Warsaw, 1910 — d. Israel, 1997), horah mamterah was famously performed by the Yemenite-Israeli singer, Shoshana Damari (1923-2006).
Sara Feldman will be presenting excerpts of her work in class, and offer us a chance to see and discuss how identity can be performed in its multi-dimensional nuances.
For general reference, here’s a 1965 version of the song, by Itamar Cohen:
And here is a version based on Shoshana Damari’s classic rendition by Israeli drag queen, Galina Port de Bras (if you wish to hear a “clean” version, with Damari’s singing without the cheers of the crowd, click here):
For the sake of history, you may also want to take a look at an archival photograph Moshe Wilensky and Shoshana Damari (a mighty duo of Israeli music), performing for Jewish refugees (read: Holocaust survivors) in Cyprus, waiting to immigrate to Palestine in 1947-1948.
I am sure you can appreciate how far this song (and the associated choreography) have come.
As I announced in class last week, the conflict with another event that had been previously scheduled at The Magnes for tomorrow, Tuesday April 17, 2012, is providing us with the welcome opportunity to be the guests of our neighbors across the street, The Marsh Arts Center.
Class will meet there (2120 Allston Way), at the usual time. Please be punctual, so that we can all enjoy some of the student performances planned for this semester:
Hannah Glass will present her research on creating a new fusion genre based on the various musical cultures explored in class
Steven Yang (violin) and Michelle Lin (cello) will present their work on klezmer genres
Ran Zhang will present her work on cross-cultural performance practice, and play two Israeli songs on the gu zheng (the link only works with a UC Berkeley secure connection)
This all looks (and sounds) quite promising, and we are indeed very fortunate to be able to use a fully equipped art performance space this week.
See you tomorrow!
Francesco
P.S. I will be posting specific listening assignments for this week’s lecture (Thursday) on bspace and the blog as usual. As you recall, there is no longer a need to submit written responses at this point. I graded all assignments last week. Instead, we will be discussing plans for the upcoming Final (refer to the syllabus for the date).
