Conference Agenda

In the years following World War II, American Jews revolutionized their weddings, abandoning many traditional customs and introducing such innovations as photographers, floral wedding canopies, and “kosher style” catering. But while Jewish weddings transformed and modernized, one aspect remained unwavering: Jewish dance music. In this paper, I explore the relationship between wedding music and American-Jewish identity in early postwar New York (1945–1960). I argue that the symbolic significance of Jewish dance music increased, and it became one of the primary markers of Jewishness at American weddings. Drawing on archival research, sound recordings, and more than sixty oral history interviews, I demonstrate how the varied wedding musical repertoires reflected the diversity of New York’s Jewish communities.

The musical repertoire at postwar American-Jewish weddings was comprised of a host of partially overlapping styles and genres, including swing, rock, Latin music, waltzes, and polkas, as well as various styles of Jewish dance music, such as klezmer, Israeli folk song, and Hasidic tunes. The proportion between these diverse repertoires depended on various social and cultural factors, but in most cases, Jewish music was relegated to the margins, clearing the stage for American popular styles. Yet although it was often reduced to a minimum, Jewish dance music remained an immovable feature of Jewish weddings in early postwar New York, transcending denominational, socio-economic, linguistic, and political boundaries. For non-Orthodox Jews, especially, music came to stand in for Jewish culture as a whole. Jewish dance music was particularly suited for this role, among other reasons, because American Jews regarded its sounds as audible markers of Jewishness, and because it was more readily accessible than other traditional practices that required linguistic or religious expertise. Like other cultural practices, Jewish dance music changed during the postwar period, absorbing stylistic elements from American popular genres and shifting towards the repertoire of Israeli folk songs and dances. Nevertheless, it exhibited meaningful continuities with the Jewish past, making it an effective means for signaling Jewishness that persists at American-Jewish weddings to this day.

Balalaika and domra are two plucked lutes that arrived in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century with émigrés from the Russian Empire. Over the following years, the emergence of so-called balalaika orchestras within the diaspora marked a significant cultural development across the country, evolving into what Mark Slobin refers to as one of the subcultural musics in the United States (1993). Despite facing constraints during the Cold War and the McCarthy era, which cast a negative light on Russian culture, diasporic balalaika orchestras were gaining popularity, and by the 1960s, balalaika and domra music entered the U.S. college campuses and reached communities beyond diasporically concentrated areas, consistently attracting both heritage and non-heritage musicians to form newly founded groups. This interest culminated in the establishment of The Balalaika and Domra Association of America (BDAA) in 1978 to promote and advance knowledge about these musical instruments.

Using my ethnographic fieldwork with the BDAA members and archival research, I examine transnational alterations of the balalaika and domra, tracing their development within the context of U.S. subcultural music from 1910 to the present. My primary focus is the transitional moment when the diasporic balalaika orchestras became an “affinity culture” extending beyond heritage musicians. (Slobin 1993). In my analysis, I am shifting the focus from internal processes within a musical community to concentrate on the objects of their musical desire—balalaikas and domras. Drawing from Heidegger’s notion of the ability to encounter nearness through things (1972) and the questions that thing theory asks, I look at what symbolic action balalaikas and domras hold for both heritage and non-heritage musicians and how they mediate the sense of a self and the sense of others.

Música folklórica [folkloric music], a music genre performed by the Grupos folklóricos [folkloric groups] that utilize typically ​Kena-zampoña-[wind instruments] charango-guitar [string instruments]-bombo [drum], has become a symbol of national identity in the region of the Andes mountains from Venezuela to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Grupos folklóricos across the globe perform and revive their identities in countries such as Japan, Germany, and the United States continuing and furthering this musical tradition. During the second half of the twentieth century, performances, and recordings by internationally known groups such as the Bolivian conjunto Los Kjarkas became a symbol of Pan-Andean identity and still, today, bring a sense of nostalgia to large global audiences.

In this paper, I examine the varying performance practices of Andean music in a diasporic context, including the meanings and interpretations of traditional Andean tunes in settings removed from their original geographic and cultural contexts. Based on an ethnographic and musicological study, I inquire about the role of the performance of ​m​úsica folklórica have for Latin American students in educational environments in the Florida Panhandle, U.S., and how the performance of certain pieces, such as those from conjunto Los Kjarkas, might spark larger conversations about informal learning practices in music ensembles as a mechanism for understanding Latin American cultural heritage, the formation/transformation of identity, and as means of constructing an activist music education. To explore the aforementioned queries, I will first describe the context in which the grupo folklórico and its music and dance grew in popularity around the globe. Then, I will depict my approach to directing an Andean ensemble in a university context of the Florida Panhandle, how alumni continue performing and expanding the practiced traditions, and how this community engages in larger conversations about a Pan-Latin American identity.