The State of Afterness: Contemporary Music in and about Israel

The British Journal of Sociology, 2006

Journal of Palestine Studies

This is an ethnographic study of the fraught and complex cultural politics of music making in Palestine-Israel in the context of the post-Oslo era. I examine the politics of sound and the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, and also, contextualize political action. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape contemporary artistic production in Israel-Palestine are informed by profound imbalances of power between the State (Israel), the stateless (Palestinians of the occupied Palestinian territories), the complex positioning of Israel's Palestinian minority, and contingent exposure to ongoing political violence. Cultural production in this period is also profoundly informed by highly polarized sentiments and retreat from the expressive modes of relationality that accompanied the 1990s peace process, strategic shifts in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, which is increasingly taking place on the world stage through diplomatic and cultural work, and the conceptual life and currency Palestine has gained as an entity deserving of statehood around the world. The ethnography attends to how the conflict is lived and expressed, musically and discursively, in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) of the West Bank, encompassing different sites, institutions and individuals. I examine the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, with the understanding that musical culture is a sphere in which power and hegemony are asserted, negotiated and resisted through shifting relations between and within different groups. In all the different contexts presented, the dissertation is thematically and theoretically underpinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize social and spatial boundaries in a situation of conflict. Beginning with cultural policy promoted by music institutions located in Israel and in the West Bank, the ethnography focuses on two opposing approaches to cultural interventions in the conflict: music as a site of resistance and nation building amongst Palestinian music conservatories located in the oPt, and music is a site of fostering coexistence and shared models of citizenship amongst Jewish and Arab citizens in mixed Palestinian-Jewish environments in Israel. This follows with the ways in which music making is used to rewrite the spatial and temporal boundaries imposed on individuals and communities by the repressive regime of the occupation. The ethnography also attends to the ways in which the cultural construction of place and nation is lived and sounded outside of institutional frameworks, in the blurry boundaries and 'boderzones' where fixed ethno-national divisions do not align with physical spaces and individual identities. This opens up spaces for alternative imaginings of national and post-national identities, of resistance and coexistence, of the universal and the particular, that musically highlight the daily struggles of individuals and communities negotiating multiplex modalities of difference.

Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production, 2021

Music in Conflict studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel, where conflict has both shaped and claimed the lives of Palestinians and Jews. In the context of the geography of violence that characterizes the conflict, borders and boundaries are material and social manifestations of the ways in which the production of knowledge is conditioned by political and structural violence. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape artistic production in this context are informed by pro-found imbalances of power and contingent exposure to violence. Viewing expressive culture as a potent site for understanding these dynamics, the book examines the politics of sound to show how music-making reflects and forms identities, and in the process, shapes communities. The ethnography is based on fieldwork conducted in Israel and the West Bank in 2011–2012 and other excursions since then. Author has “followed the conflict” by “following the music,” from concert halls to demonstrations, mixed-city community centers to Palestinian refugee camp children’s clubs, alternative urban scenes and even a checkpoint. In all the different contexts presented, the monograph is thematically and theoretically under-pinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize both spatial and social boundaries in a situation of conflict.

GeoJournal, 2006

No culture, no society, remains static but changes imperceptibly day by day. The struggle waged by western art music in Israel for survival is eerily suggestive of how Israeli society in general has changed since the early Zionists set the course for the creation of a Jewish nation-state. Once regarded as the civilized face and civilizing influence of the Jewish national endeavour in Palestine/Israel, its advocates claim ever more desperately that western art music in Israel is in a state of rapid decline. Yet public opinion surveys reveal that the Israeli public backs state support for arts and culture whether or not people participate in cultural activities. Despite this, the internal ethnic struggle for domination of the arts and culture world and the rearguard action by culture administrators are both in danger of being overtaken by the country's exposure to global popular culture.

2014

"ewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History revolutionizes the study of modern Israeli art music by tracking the surprising itineraries of Jewish art music in the move from Europe to Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Leaving behind clichés about East and West, Arab and Jew, this book provocatively exposes the legacies of European antisemitism and religious Judaism in the making of Israeli art music. Shelleg introduces the reader to various aesthetic dilemmas involved in the emergence of modern Jewish art music, ranging from auto-exoticism through the hues of self-hatred to the disarticulation of Jewish musical markers. He then considers part of this musics' translocation to Mandatory Palestine, studying its discourse with Hebrew culture, and composers' grappling with modern and Zionist images of the self. Unlike previous efforts in the field, Shelleg unearths the mechanism of what he calls "Zionist musical onomatopoeias," but more importantly their dilution by the non-western Arab Jewish oral musical traditions (the same traditions Hebrew culture sought to westernize and secularize). And what had begun with composers' movement towards the musical properties of non-western Jewish musical traditions grew in the 60s and 70s to a dialectical return to exilic Jewish cultures. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, which reaffirmed Zionism's redemptive and expansionist messages, Israeli composers (re)embraced precisely the exilic Jewish music that emphasized Judaism's syncretic qualities rather than its territorial characteristics. In the 70s, therefore, while religious Zionist circles translated theology into politics and territorial maximalism, Israeli composers deterritorialized the national discourse by a growing return to the spaces shared by Jews and non-Jews, devoid of Zionist appropriations. TOC Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction: Jewish Contiguities; Translocated Pasts Facing the Levant 1. Hava Nagila? Decentering the Eastern European Soundscape Jewish Inversions Aesthetic Confines Rethinking Bloch Disarticulating Jewishness Historiographical Silhouettes Control Cases In Lieu of a Summary 2. From Pre- to Post-Statehood: Hebrewism Diluted Ringing the Bells and Whistles of the Zionist Project: National Musical Onomatopoeias Adjacent yet Oppositional: Subversive Hebrewists Statehood and the Demise of Romanticist Nationalism Destabilizing Western Metaphors of the East Consuming the Source Thematic Incongruities (or, Violating Kairological Time) 3. 1960s-1970s: Articulating Jewishness in Israeli Art Music 1967 Enter the New Pioneers The Multivocal Negation of the Diaspora and its Dissolution Avni: Counterpointing Modes of Memory Epitaph for Whom? Kopytman: Transcribing Jewish Heterophonies Hebrewism Diluted: Judaism Deterritorialized Seter: Muting Oneself 4. Reshuffling Historiographical Cards Notes Index"

ntercontextual Musical Currents and Performative Traditions in Palestine/Israel and Germany in the 20th century, in Comparative Studies in the Humanities, Guy G. Stroumsa, ed., Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2018., 2018

Comparative approaches take for granted that historical, sociological, and anthropological phenomena, as well as art works, systems of ideas, and cultural practices, can be distinct and comparable at the same time. The notion of mutual influence is an old one, but most comparisons assume a sustained separateness of the compared phenomena. In comparing political and social entities, awareness of the exchanges and migrations of people and ideas usually does not alter this basic approach. However, the advent of modernity has brought better documentation of interrelations of this kind and associated them with processes of accelerated change and rupture, making the stability of the comparanda more difficult to maintain. A conceptual framework is called for that permits an account of ongoing reciprocities between the compared entities, such as may result from diasporic connections, direct import and export of commodities and ideas, and other forms of borrowing and integration. The article offers "intercontextuality" as a framework through which to assess such phenomena, and looks in particular into Musical Currents and Performative Traditions Twentieth-Century Palestine/Israel and Germany.

2016

After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett's account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike often equate music with instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term "critical music," this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music's unique historical forms. Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past ten years—Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others—After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic music that dominates new music circles today.

The article investigates the 1988 music album Efer Veavak (in Hebrew: Ashes and Dust) that was created by Yehuda Poliker and Ya'akov Gilad, two Israeli--born children of Holocaust survivors’ parents. The article’s findings suggest that the Holocaust story as told through Ashes and Dust emphasizes individual aspects rather than collective lessons and there is a growing sensitivity to the issue of memory preservation. Moreover, Ashes and Dust highlights the notion that the survivors' children are now the bearers of Holocaust memory, and that it is through them that the Holocaust becomes an Israeli story about the present, rather than only a Diaspora story about the past. These tendencies are amplified by the fact that Ashes and Dust is a popular culture product. The public use of the songs through radio broadcasting has in many cases caused them to be assimilated into the mainstream flow and has blurred their initial identification as markers of a singular event, the Holocaust.

The article asks why the Israeli theatre's 'voicing hegemony' practices endure despite a critical public debate that favors cultural pluralism. Ethnographies at two central repertory theatres elicit the meanings of the theatre's 'back-to-the past' institutional habitus, as revealed in observations and in-depth interviews with actors, and disclose artistic dispositions that bolster veteran actors' stature in the theatre and Israeli art generally. Analysis of the findings links professional capital with the twilight of an artist's theatrical career. One conclusion connects the theatrical habitus with justification of Israel's Zionist ideology. Theoretically, the article illuminates the historical component of the Bourdieuian concept of habitus. The duplication of this component in the backto-the-past habitus inheres to mythification processes and makes the theatrical habitus relatively resilient to social changes.