Conference Agenda

This study examines the complex relationship between English musical culture and Jewry. It proceeds from the understanding that it is impossible to separate Jews within “musical England” from the complex social spaces that Jews inhabited throughout England’s history.

There have been numerous studies of European Jewry within the classical music tradition on the continent, many of which address its relationship with English Jewry. There have also been several monographs on English Jewry and its history. There does not exist, however, a synthesis, a project that focuses on Musical England and the Jew. This is the gap I seek to fill, while also contributing to English antisemitism studies.

Chapter One begins the synthesis, focusing on the historical relationship between Jewry and Music in England. Chapter Two, focuses on antisemitism in England during the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had evolved into a rare form of “European” antisemitism: disguised and almost polite with all the sensibilities of the Victorian, it nevertheless became as pernicious as was seen in Central Europe. Chapter Three is on nineteenth and twentieth-century English musical nationalism and the so-called English Musical Renaissance, which propounded fictitious narratives of the past and championed local particularity, in which the universal “cosmopolitan” Jew was its antithesis. Chapter Four examines the classic question of a Jew’s national identity in a post-Westphalian state and the complexities of assimilation in the 19th and 20th centuries. This leads us to examine the relationship between Zionism and the English state, and how music was caught up in the fray. Chapter Five, therefore, synthesizes what has come before it, viewing the history of Jewry in England through the multivalent lens of the concurrent movements of Zionism and English musical nationalism. Chapter Six offers a case study on Gerald Finzi, the nominally “first-rate second-rate” English composer born to Jewish parents in London but—through music—became the personification of Blake’s “green and pleasant lands.” His story is one of archetypal Jewish-English assimilation, born from Musical England’s unique, centuries-long, complicated relationship with the Jew.

This project examines Yiddish lullabies (viglider) as musical and poetic sites in which the cultural imaginary of mame-loshn—mother tongue; also “mama-language”—finds voice and is made audible. Mame-loshn is an affectionate name for Yiddish that conveys the language’s imagined capacities for feminine frankness and endearing simplicity, as well as its association with emotional directness and anti-modern plainness. While Yiddish lullabies are typically understood as functional domestic songs designed to soothe children, I argue that they instead constitute a highly structured musical genre that gives voice to collective anxieties about family, labor, and vulnerability, often through lament, anger, and unease. In doing so, they make audible a set of assumptions about how Yiddish itself is believed to work. This chapter shows that in Yiddish viglider, lulling means saying out loud the things most others would rather not say at all. Yiddish therefore functions as a mode of musical speech uniquely suited to candor, complaint, and the articulation of truths that cannot be voiced elsewhere.

Methodologically, the dissertation (of which this advanced chapter draft is a part) brings close textual analysis into conversation with affect theory and cultural history in order to ask how modern Jewish cultural forms implicitly work out the assumptions that make them legible and meaningful. This chapter pursues that question through sound. Here I analyze rhythmic pacing, repetition, and vocal address alongside poetic structure and performance context, treating Yiddish lullabies not as spontaneous expressions of maternal feeling but as established musical forms that circulate between oral tradition, print song collections, and literary adaptation.

Reading these lullabies as sites where musical convention and affective expectation converge makes visible a broader historical problem: how Yiddish since the Haskalah came to be understood as a language of intimacy, directness, and anti-pretense.

In the context of this workshop, I would welcome feedback on the following: How can I more effectively connect close musical analysis to broader claims about language ideology and affect? Are there alternative musicological frameworks—such as genre theory or performance studies—that might better capture how lullabies produce intimacy than the concept of the “intimate public”?

The towering figure of the Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890) has loomed large over Jewish music historiography since the earliest Jewish musicological studies of the nineteenth century. Monographs by Hanoch Avenary and Tina Frühauf, as well as the Sulzer centenary volume edited by Berhnard Purin, have added to other more topical articles on the subject of Sulzer and his impact on synagogue music. Yet a complete biography of Sulzer has not yet been realized. My project is to begin such an endeavor, starting with the first chapter of Sulzer’s life in Hohenems and Endingen (1804-1825). This would comprise an intensive study of the places and major figures surrounding Sulzer’s youth and musical training, including Shlomo Eichberg and Israel Lowy, as well as the analysis of primary sources and archival research to distinguish fact from fiction, where possible, in the narratives penned by Sulzer’s early biographers. In addition, my project would follow on Phillip Bohlman’s work on the cantorial performance of “Otherness” and more intimately track the role of Sulzer’s musical activities, much remarked upon by Christian attendees of his services and concerts, in the construction of Austrian and European national identity.

Specific questions:

1. Beyond the major literature, local archives, and reaching out to Sulzer-related institutions (Jüdisches Museum Wien, Jüdisches Museum Hohenems), what sources/scholars might I best engage with to probe the JEwish history?

2. How do Jews and Jewish music figure in the role(s) that Jews played in Christian and European consciousness at the end of the long eighteenth century?