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June 1, 1918
Jewish music is the face of a frozen sphinx which, after the millennium of its antiquity, is still only on the path to discovering its secret, is only now waking to life…
It is well known that tunes of songs, no less than their texts, often provide an historical mirror of an exceedingly sharp focus. A special category of such songs are the so- called “migrating” or…
Let us begin with the most basic questions: Can oral traditions of music constitute a reliable source for historical research? While this question is applicable to most music…
“Practically everyone has seen the prize-winning musical about the lovable people in that little village in Old Russia called Anetevka [sic]. Well, as far as we’re concerned, ‘Fiddler’ made a goof!” M…
What we now routinely call klezmer in the United States—“Do you play klezmer?” “There’s a new klezmer album out”—is a truly American construct in three ways: the word sidesteps aesthetic and political…
In 1947, when Kurt Weill’s orchestral arrangement of Hatikva received its world premiere in New York, it was still—as it had been for decades—the anthem of the modern Zionist movement, expressing the…