Conference Agenda

Beyond the abandoning of adherence to one faith for the sake of another, conversional processes can also convey subtler shifts of religious identity, and not solely of people, but also of cultural expressions such as texts, images, spaces, or sounds. One distinctive characteristic usually encompassing various modes of conversion lies in the liminal condition of converted objects (or subjects) that are almost never fully converted but rather drift in between religious, cultural, and social conditions. The realm of sound and music encapsulates a fertile ground for the development of a diversity of such conversional modes in view of its lesser reliance on a verbal language that becomes a potential barrier between different religious communities. This roundtable will offer new approaches to the intricate confluence of music and conversion, focusing on transhistorical case studies of Jewish-Christian interface that is evidenced not only by textual accounts but also by a large body of musical works that allows a wide perspective on how conversion can be represented musically.

The roundtable will include four brief position papers and a response, covering an array of conversional aspects linked to music and musicians. The first paper will discuss the case of Obadiah, a Jewish proselyte of Norman-Italian ecclesiastical background whose inscription of notated piyyutim in the twelfth-century Middle Eastern environment suggests an interreligious encounter with crusader counterparts in several fields, ranging from notational practices to shared aspirations of religious conquest. The second paper will consider how cantorial contrafacts in the eighteenth-century Amsterdam Portuguese Synagogue converted the sacred space and contributed to the construction of an acoustic community through the deployment of Italianate music. The third paper will consider the case of Harriett Abrams, who had converted from Judaism to Christianity in the 1790s, but whose sentimental ballads published in the following decade convey her continued affiliation with social “outsiders.” Finally, the fourth paper will position the practice of conversion by Jewish composers in fin-de-siecle Vienna in the context of post-secular approaches, discussing how religious frameworks were drained of their spiritual and communal functions and how the institution of art music was concomitantly imbued with spiritual functions.