Conference Agenda

Since the late 1800s Jewish music has been commercially recorded. Because music has been an important part of the American Jewish experience, these recordings are important primary historical documents chronicling the history and development of Jewish life and culture in America. However, to date, there has been no comprehensive study of the tens of thousands of recordings that exist in archives and libraries across the U.S.

Since 2019, a research team from the UCLA Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience has been developing a robust data set for the purpose of analyzing the considerable body of commercial recordings of music that reflect the Jewish American experience. The project is called the UCLA Database of Recorded Jewish Music in America. This is built on commercial recordings in the United States. To assemble the database, the research team acquired collection data from archival recording collections held at institutions throughout the U.S. and combined them in a newly built MySQL database. Additionally, the research team has used data visualization software to aid analysis, produce large-scale visualizations, and hopes to use this software to make its data available to external researchers.

New Approaches to Studying Recorded Jewish Music presents the potential advantages and challenges of a data-oriented approach to the study of music in the American Jewish experience. Individual presentations will be given by the project’s three primary architects and will explore three issues (genres and time period) in American Jewish Music enhanced by the UCLA Database of Recorded Jewish Music in America project.

The first presentation will delve into recorded lullabies to explore themes of nostalgia, domesticity, and immigrant culture. The second presentation will show how the Immigration Act of 1924 affected the production of Jewish musical recordings during what was poised to be their apex. The final presentation will look at the most frequently recorded sacred titles and ask what their variety (or lack thereof) tells us about music and the Jewish American experience over the course of the twentieth century.

The lullaby, defined as a tune or song used to soothe children to sleep, has also served as a vehicle for nostalgia and the aspirations of its creators. While firmly entrenched in domesticity, the lullaby has traveled with the Jewish people throughout the diaspora containing echoes of both home and hopes for tomorrow. As Ruth Rubin has noted, the Jewish lullaby has conveyed shifting values in its communities, from the Torah study and piety encouraged in the lullabies of the early 19th century to the end of the century where lullabies begin to reflect the political atmosphere of Eastern Europe and the migrations to America. As the recording industry grew alongside large diasporas to the United States, the industry's growing involvement in music for domestic consumption resulted in material made for the expression of evolving female gender roles. As Kenney has observed, women were the primary consumers of recorded music in the early 20th century, determining recording practice through consumption habits. Music of daily life, lullabies included, became popular recorded items.

The recorded lullaby’s presence in Jewish émigré life is evidenced in Jewish recorded history that resounds throughout a newly created Database of Recorded Jewish Music in America, a part of a larger Digital Humanities project at UCLA: Visualizing Recorded Jewish Music. Through collating the collections of recorded Jewish Music from numerous United States institutions and organizations, the database project has aggregated an unprecedented compendium of recording data. This new database provides for an expansive investigation of the Jewish lullaby across recorded archives. Through a series of visualizations utilizing Tableau software, this paper examines Jewish immigrant domestic life, aspirations and anxieties, gendered listening and consumption practices, as well as the recording trends and hierarchies present in Jewish American life. Visualizing the recorded Jewish lullaby reveals how musical domesticity shaped United States recording practice and provided Jewish émigré women a space for cultural reflection, remembrance, and exchange.

The 1920s was a fruitful decade for Jewish music in America: the Yiddish musical theater was in its heyday, European cantors were playing to sold-out crowds, Jewish composers were creating Jewish classical music while also making their mark on the American musical landscape, and Jewish songwriters on Tin Pan Alley helped create the American songbook. It was also a decade in which the growing music industry created and marketed "race records" to a country that was obsessed with both race and the technology of recorded music. A surge of musical recording activity that had been supported by a steady stream of new Eastern European Jewish immigrants collided with the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of new immigrants allowed into the U.S. to 2% of existing population estimates based on ethnicity (and excluded immigrants from Asia entirely). If, as William Howland Kenney argues in Recorded Music in American Life, musical recordings in late 19th and early 20th centuries played an important role in shaping "collective aural memories through which various groups of Americans were able to locate and identify themselves" (1999: xvii), how might this new law have altered the collective memory and identity of American Jewry? This paper utilizes the UCLA Database of Recorded Jewish Music in America to investigate a steep drop in the production of commercial Jewish music recordings that occurred in the years surrounding the passage of the 1924 immigration bill. It asks how politics influenced changes in the production of these recordings , and how the recordings reflected and influenced a population as it adapted to American life in the roaring twenties.

During the era of 78rpm recordings of Jewish music the main genres are: art, cantorial, Yiddish theater, Yiddish songs, and klezmer. Cantorial music is the largest genre in the first-half of the Twentieth Century. Art music recordings were prominent in the early Twentieth Century and Jewish related content was included, such as Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei and Ernst Bloch's “Jewish Cycle.” While my main focus is on the largest genre that is found within the Jewish community, cantorial music, I also consider the impact of sacred music on other genres. The period 1880-1920 is called the Golden Age of Cantorial Music because it represents the time period of the significant immigration of nearly 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States. These immigrants hailed cantors as the sonic harbingers of their homeland and as heroes. Dozens of cantors had robust careers in synagogues and as performers, recordings prolifered. The UCLA Database of Recorded Jewish Music in America project is an ideal resource to trace the history and prominence of cantorial music. The presentation will investigate the artists, styles and expressions showing a range of contexts from artistic to theatrical. My focus will be on “Kol Nidre,” the statement of vows that starts the Yom Kippur service, which is the most recorded cantorial title throughout the twentieth century. Recordings of “Kol Nidre” from cantorial, Yiddish Theatre and art will show a wide array contexts demonstrating fluidity and flexibility of recorded Jewish Music in America.