Conference Agenda

In October 1968 in a parking garage in the middle of Cologne, voices echoed, birds sang and milk gurgled at an exhibition-installation entitled 5-Day-Race. The new, nonprofit collective Laboratory for Research on Acoustic and Visual Events (Labor e. V.) staged this series of happenings by its founders, who included the visual-conceptual artists Wolf Vostell, Ursula Burghardt and composer Mauricio Kagel. While the more prominent Vostell and Kagel have received attention in art historical and musicological scholarship, their co-founder, Burghardt, has remained largely forgotten.

This paper builds on notions of an “avant-garde diaspora” (Cohen 2012) and recent attention to the constitutive bonds of friendship for artist communities (Dohoney 2022) through discussion of Burghardt’s piece for the 5-Day-Race, the interactive acoustic sculpture Crooked Levels. While Vostell, Kagel and Burghardt lived in Cologne at the time and practiced a radical, avant-garde aesthetic that questioned bourgeois norms and expectations, they also found affinity with each other as Jewish artists who had experienced displacement, from Argentina and within Europe. Analyzing archival videos, photographs, newspapers and sketches, as well as oral histories I have collected in the U.S. and Europe, I examine Burghardt’s Crooked Levels, contextualizing it within Burghardt’s broader contributions to musical-artistic life in West Germany.

1968 marked a decade since Burghardt’s first participation in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. In the intervening time, Burghardt had published in Die Reihe, exhibited her work on an airplane as part of the first World Air Art-Salon, and collaborated with her composer-husband Kagel in Fluxus-inflected events and performances. In short, Burghardt pursued a feminist artistic practice that questioned the traditional narrow boundaries of activity and expression allowed by a woman in 1960s West Germany, much less a Jewish woman who was raised in Argentina after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1935. Taking Burghardt’s Crooked Levels as a case study, I demonstrate how projects like the Labor e. V. shed light on artistic collaborations that result in different imaginings of performance and performativity in a musical context, including traditional definitions of the musical instrument, instrumentality and who is allowed to claim the title of “composer.”

In their meeting minutes of March 21, 1900, the board members of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company vowed to keep their opera boxes out of “the hands of undesirable persons.” Yet, in 1917 when the board awarded ownership of Opera Box 14 to financier Otto H. Kahn, they seemed to act in direct opposition with the bylaws they had earlier codified. After all, Jews were undesirables in early twentieth century America, and Kahn, for all that he took an active role in the Met’s operating company and accrued eighty-four percent of its stock by his retirement, could not escape his Jewish background (Collins 2002, Sarna 2004, Lombardo 2008). As my paper shows, Kahn was not the only Jewish man to dedicate himself to this opera house in spite of prevailing antisemitism.

Extensive archival and press research in the Metropolitan Opera Archives, the partners of the Center for Jewish History, and Harvard University’s Houghton Library reveals that men of Jewish descent proved instrumental to the Met’s daily operations between its autocratic incorporation in 1880 and its democratization in 1940. Taking on diverse roles from impresario and conductor to photographer and box office treasurer, they became fixtures of labor, voluntarism, and patronage at all levels of the organization. Given the prevalence of histories that discount a Jewish presence at the Met, recognizing their impact necessitates a comprehensive revision of the institution’s historiography.

This paper retells the traditional history of the Met’s first sixty years, with a new emphasis on the essential roles played by its Jewish constituents, while identifying the impact of their Jewishness on their treatment. The radical act of deliberately moving Jews from the historical periphery to its center – what several Jewish historians have recently called treating Jewish studies as “counter-history” – inverts a secular narrative that was formerly constructed to eschew a Jewish presence (Heschel 1998, Biale 1999, Wiese 2000). Instead, I argue that attending to these men’s personal and professional realities as dual “undesirables” and “essentials” at the Met provides an empowering case study for understanding the fraught nature of minoritarian interactions within other American cultural institutions.

At the age of thirteen, Isaac Nathan (1790–1864) was sent to a Hebrew academy in Cambridge to follow in his father’s trade and become a chazan (cantor). Upon completing his studies, though, he began an apprenticeship under the well-respected Anglo-Italian voice teacher Domenico Corri in London. Though Nathan never converted or abandoned the cultural ethos of Judaism, transitioning from meshorrer (cantor’s assistant) training to the Italian (bel canto) school meant altering his ancestral and embodied practice of song. In so doing, he acquired a second foreign lineage—a patrimony not of birth but study, not of the East but the South.

This paper explores Nathan’s multilocal legacy of voice amid Britain’s expanding intra-European dominance and increased liberalism during the Regency era. It re-imagines the decolonial notion of “border thought,” as theorized by scholars such as Walter Mignolo and Ramón Grosfoguel, as a praxis of “border song” to offer a more nuanced understanding of Nathan’s circumstances as an Anglo-Jewish musician with Italian training in post-Enlightenment England. From the late seventeenth century, Great Britain had re-welcomed Jews under the guise of religious tolerance while casting their way of life as the remnant of an Oriental past, incompatible with the modern, secular West. Nathan’s vocal treatise cum global history of music, Musurgia Vocalis (1836), weaves a mosaic of vocal practices across time and space, the foundations of which can be gleaned from those of his teacher Corri, whose ballad opera, The Travellers (1806), tracing the supposed birth and evolution of music from East to West.

This paper contributes to a genealogy of early “global” musicology in the British imperial context, highlighting the narrative trajectories of histories aiming at completeness in historical or geographical scope. In response to the marginalization of Jewish vocal practices as anti-modern and anti-Western—the coloniality of song—Nathan assumed a praxis of border singing. Navigating those borderlands required of Nathan an aesthetic and physiological triangulation of voice and ear between England, Italy, and the Jewish diaspora. In so doing, he disrupted the same colonial categories of space and time that first shaped his earliest praxis of voice.