Assaf Shelleg: about Jews; New Affordances in Contemporary Music

New music written by or about Jews no longer abides by exoticisms, national paraphernalia, or the prestige of “art music.” Instead, growing disillusioned with (or disinterested in) ideological apparatuses and tropes of Otherness, composers navigate through signs associated with Judaism while introducing new ethnographies in the form of fieldwork recordings, simulations of their oral behavioral patterns, or their entextualizing. With this they steadily undo the modernist divide between ethnography and art. The talk will situate the proliferation of contemporary Jewish art music in the ecosystem of new music, focusing on works by Chaya Czernowin, Heiner Goebbels, and Olga Neuwirth while considering the historiographical impact of the recordings released by the Milken Archive.

This event is made possible by the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and the UCLA Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.