The Online Program of events for the 2023 AMS & SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type.
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Presenter(s): Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower) (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Bonnie Gordon (University of Virginia), Rebecca Cypess (Rutgers University), Kathryn Huether (Bowdoin College)
Organized by the AMS Jewish Studies and Music Study Group
For many centuries, Jews and the sounds they make have occupied a place of great importance in musical, cultural, and theological discourses of the West. Despite their minority status, Jews and people of Jewish ancestry have played a major part in composition, performance, and patronage, as well as in journalism and scholarship about music. In addition to Jewish participation in music-related activities, the figure of the Jew as a musical (or often non-musical) Other was key in shaping the musical world-order: as Ruth HaCohen has argued (2011), since at least the second millennium CE, the Jew in Western Europe was categorized as a producer of noise, in dissonance with the purportedly harmonious-sounding Christian universe. Jews became a symbol of sonic alterity, both as actual people and as an abstract, aesthetic category. As a result, relations between Jews and non-Jews in and around music were often tense or even hostile, leading to diverse displays of anti-Semitism: from negative and stereotypical representations of Jews in musical works, through rejections of Jews in social and professional musical settings, to harmful and even violent depictions of Jews in musicological writings.
In recent years, North America has witnessed an increase in the number, visibility, and intensity of anti-Semitic incidents and rhetoric, both in musical spaces and in public discourse. Scholars engaged in the study of Jewish music, as well as those who personally identify as Jewish, experience this intensification firsthand in their research, teaching, and communities. This session addresses the topic of anti-Semitism in music by featuring a diverse panel of scholars whose expertise reflects a wide range of scholarship and personal experience relating to Jewishness and anti-Semitism in music and academia. Panelists will draw on insights from their historical and ethnographic research, as well as from their own encounters with anti-Semitism in professional and institutional settings in North America and beyond. Particular attention will be given to anti-Semitism in musical and musicological works; anti-Semitism in social, professional, and institutional frameworks relating to music and music studies; and the diverse manifestations of anti-Semitism across periods and locales. The speakers’ remarks will be followed by a roundtable discussion and a Q&A regarding the state of the field today, generating a dialogue among musicologists of various career stages, research interests, and institutional homes.
