Around 1973 I was looking for a change. I had written a bunch of reference works on Afghanistan and Central Asia and was rounding out the book. I found myself wondering what it would be like to study something as an insider, rather than the rank outsider I felt like in Afghanistan. I was introduced to Yiddish music studies by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, not just a fine scholar, but a sparkplug and mentor for so many for so long. She met me at YIVO, the Jewish Music Research Institute, which I had actually never heard of, and I was knocked out by the personnel and resources. I had never been to any kind of free-standing research institute. It turned out there were other junior academics like me and a rising crowd of very talented graduate students that I was joining in a Zeitgeist moment.
What I thought would be a temporary work cycle has continued ever since, partly, in the earlier years because Afghanistan fell into its dreadful non-stop series of disasters and fieldwork was out of the question outside refugee camps and the diaspora. But basically the Yiddish culture work and then the History of the American Cantorate project drew me in deeply, resulting in several monographs, anthologies, and translation editions you can find on my cv. Here I’ve put together a few pieces –lectures, a reference work, scattered articles- that mark way-stations on my path through Jewish studies.
The next item, an unpublished talk, surveys my interest in the early Yiddish theater again, but more specifically highlights my own intervention, in terms of a revival and an original one-act play I produced at Wesleyan.
This is a revised version of a talk given in 1993. It combines my Yiddish music and film music interests and was just meant as an exploratory piece for a new area, like so much of my writing. But despite an article here and there, no one has written a comprehensive study of the way that music shaped Yiddish-language cinema in its heyday (ca. 1915-50) and recent creative film projects.
Here are two unpublished talks I gave generally outlining my approach to Jewish-American music as a system of musical choice and aesthetics. They overlap a bit, but also cover somewhat different ground.
One is a lecture I gave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (year unknown), the other an introduction to David Krakauer’s concert at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton in 2007 (kindly invited by Paul Moravec), along with another introduction to Krakauer at Wesleyan.
My interest in boosting “eclecticism” as a term is on display in other writings of this period. The project of looking over the longue durée of something like Jewish-American music rather than surveying recent developments is part of my philosophical outlook of seeing continuities, not just constant disjuncture, even in modernity.
This article overlaps with my analysis of Jewish-American sheet music in Tenement Songs of 1982, but adds some material not found there and in a more condensed form.
This talk surveys my approach to Moshe Beregovski (1891-1962), the great ethnomusicologist. It is a counterpart to an article on Beregovski I wrote for Ethnomusicology in 1986. I have been involved in presenting and discussing his seminal collecting and analytical work of the 1920s-40s, completed under almost unimaginably difficult conditions in the USSR, since the appearance of 1982’s Old Jewish Folk Music, a translation compendium. He rose to even greater recognition in 2020 through the activity of several online research network projects and the release of a full-length Russian documentary film.
This was a short talk given at a commemorative event for the life and career of one of my mentors and collaborators, the wonderful Chana Mlotek, long-time music archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and producer (with her husband Yosel) of major Yiddish song anthologies, as well as seminal scholarly articles. It was a great privilege late in her life to work with her on 2007’s Yiddish Folk Songs from the Ruth Rubin Archive.
I had forgotten about this article until Ethel Raim reminded me of it and gave me a copy, with her notes. This piece seems to have been the only such analytical article on the topic, despite the many song anthologies that have come out since 1901. We have put up more of such work on the website yiddishfolksong.com for what should be a growing subfield of Jewish music studies.
From 1984-6 I was Project Director for a large-scale project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I was brought into this work by Samuel Rosenbaum, the Executive Director of the Cantors Assembly, the professional organization of cantors of the Conservative denomination, who had appreciated Tenement Songs and put me on as a grant-writing consultant to promote a profession that began in 1696 in the US but had never been studied. We got the grand prize grant, which propelled me into a huge undertaking in an area I had never researched and had no literature. I recognized this as a great opportunity for an ethnomusicologist to act more like a social scientist, with the ability to hire a research staff and do substantial questionnaire, oral history, and core musical sample collecting. It was a challenging and very rewarding experience, personally as well as professionally and resulted in 1990’s Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate. The items below extend and look back on that work.
When I was researching the American cantorate, the question of women’s role in the profession had been decided favorably by the Reform denomination (1976), but was still under discussion in the Cantors Assembly. I did not include that controversy in Chosen Voices, instead producing a separate article, given here.
I never wrote an analysis of what cantors told me in the oral history interviews for HAC about improvisation. Only the older ones had the skills and vocabulary to discuss this fascinating issue. I’ve excerpted just a bit of that discourse here to give a flavor of their aesthetic and practice.
In 2014, I was asked to give a lecture at a symposium on Education of the Cantorate at the University of Weimar, an inaugural event for their new chair in Jewish music studies (under Jascha Nemtsov). This gave me a chance to review how I did the HAC and to offer some excerpts from its findings.
In 2014 I gave a paper for a symposium at the University of Weimar that inaugurated their Jewish Music chair, held by Jascha Nemtsov. This was an opportunity to look back on the HAC project, and it became an article.
This is a spinoff from the History of the American Cantorate. I had asked the eminent scholar-cantor-teacher Max Wohlberg to sing three versions of a standard Sabbath prayer. It’s a rare example of focused analysis of variants of a liturgical item by a single singer.