Aesthetics and the Israeli Music Scene

Israeli music's evolution over the last or forty years should be approached, studied and accepted as a chaotic system rather than a well-defined, clearly integrated cultural and social phenomenon. Moreover, some will argue against the very validity of delimiting and defining such a cultural phenomenon in the framework and short span of existence of modern Israel. The forties and the fifties wishfully viewed the music in the land of Israel as the triumph of a nation-in-the-making integrative culture. Composers of European descent provided both the Western know-how in articulating the local idiom and the romantic view of folklore as the repository of the deepest and most authentic spiritual elements of ethnic groups. They shared the belief that artistic expression is a major link between land's mystic and people's sensibility and felt compelled to enroll in the historical task of forging such an expression and accelerating its embedding in the emerging cultural strata. Furthermore, unlike America, perceived by its pioneers as a no man's land, Palestine was for the Jewish pioneers of the 20th century an anciently promised, biblical land, enriched by the lure of the East. Socially and ethnically, young Israel strove to become a melting pot of more than a hundred Jewish communities and local Moslem and Christian ones. Politically, the State aimed at being the pole on which everything Jewish would be defined. The absorption and integration of local elements was, therefore, a desideratum, which helped making the Eastern Mediterranean style 1 in music the dominant idiom from mid-thirties to the end of the sixties. Without any doubt, the Eastern Mediterranean style enjoyed both the tacit and overt support of all those concerned with establishing and strengthening the new political entity. It had an ethos which people much loved to identify with as well as a number of clichés proudly exhibited by many a work. Undoubtedly, the general mood and ethos of young Israel were a favorable climate to idealization in which this musical trend fitted very well. Those composers who didn't adhere to the mainstream offered only a meager challenge, since avant-garde art was unacceptable at that juncture 2. * * * The sixties witnessed the coming into maturity and prominence of a group of composers who had previously been overpowered by the activism of the founding fathers of Israeli music. Most of them were born elsewhere, but young and receptive at the moment of their immigration, and therefore intensely exposed to the socio-cultural milieu around them. One counts as most distinctive Oedoen Partos, Mordecai Seter, Joseph Tal, Abel Ehrlich and Jacob Gilboa, all composers who embarked on musical activities drastically beyond what was fashionable to the Israel musical scene. These were years of Israeli composers' eagerly looking for encounters with the latest developments in Western music. Already established composers take the trip to 1 The term was coined by Max Brod 2 In the late thirties, Stephan Wolpe gave up fighting the local artistic establishment and left for America.

Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online, 2022

Menashe Rabinovitz, head of music schools in Tel Aviv and Haifa in British Mandate Palestine, reported in May 1936 to the Tel Aviv municipality's Education and Culture division, about the First International Conference of the Society for Music Education he had attended that April in Prague as Tel Aviv's delegate. Comparing his insights to the present state of music education in the State of Israel, some positive changes are identified. These include a national curriculum for music teaching in primary schools; the supervision of music classes by an officially appointed general inspector; the promotion of school choirs, and the offering of subsidized concerts by professional musicians in schools. The singing repertoire in the Hebrew-speaking state schools remains essentially unchanged: a variety of songs in Hebrew are its core, responding to the multicultural and heterogeneous Israeli society.

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.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2000

2The imperfect term "art music" (also called "serious" and "classical" music) may be unfamiliar even to many who enjoy one or more of its various repertories. The definition found in Webster's Third New International Dictionary-"music composed by the trained musician as contrasted with folk music and often with popular music"-serves in the present instance to denote work by professional musicians schooled in the art ofmusical composition through both private instruction and in conservatory environments, whose musical ideas are conveyed through notated scores which are interpreted by performers and conductors. The unprecedented cross-pollinations characterizing our musical world in the twentieth century have lessened the potency ofsuch designations as "art," "folk," "traditional," or "popular" music, but terminology is less important here than the range ofexperience, aesthetics, objectives, and techniques that serves to unite Israeli art-music composers and distinguish them from other communities of musicians. 31 use "Israel" in references to the modem state which won its independence in 1948. In references to this region prior to Israeli statehood [ use "Palestine," the political designation of the British mandate that succeeded Ottoman rule following World War I.

This essay deals with some issues relating to music in Israel. Many regard music as a universal language bridging barriers thrown up by spoken tongues , but there is more to music than meets the ear, for music divides by ethnicity, social class and age. Since the middle 1960s when classic Israeliness began to be challenged, Israeli culture has become much more contentious. Canonical highbrow culture was important in creating Israel's social structure, especially differences between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Thus classical ''art'' music is jostled for supremacy by such genres as Israel rock, musica mizrahit, Mediterranean music, and exposure to global pop cultures. Israeli culture has developed an open market in which everyone competes for devotees.

Israel Studies, 2005

biu.ac.il

2008

The Rouledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, 2018

One of the most distinctive characteristics of Palestinian popular music is that its production is exclusively based on improvisation (on-the-spot invention), mostly by performers who operate as poets and composers at the same time. This has been going on throughout Palestinian history, accumulating a tremendous repertoire of music and lyrics of various Palestinian popular music genres such as ‘ataba, dal’ona and zajal. After providing a precise definition of Palestinian popular music and enumerating the features that distinguish it from other popular music traditions in the Arab Middle East and the rest of the world, evidence will be provided for demonstrating the fact that all researchers of Palestinian popular music agree that productivity in Palestinian popular music has been brought to its demise in the last three decades, thus turning Palestinian popular music from a living and ever-growing tradition in people’s everyday life into a frozen heritage to be reserved and taken good care of. This has been taken for granted not only by researchers, but also by artists, performers, local audiences, and all those who are now in charge of Palestinian popular music, including the Palestinian National Authority in Ramallah (the PNA). This is what I call ‘heritagising Palestinian popular music’, and consider it the most decisive (and detrimental) feature in the current Palestinian cultural landscape. I will then show that, in spite of this sharp awareness of the phenomenon of ‘heritagising Palestinian popular music’, almost none of the involved researchers has addressed this issue, nor tried to problematise it or investigate the reasons behind it. Due to this severe gap in the literature, this chapter will end with a detailed account of the sociocultural and political process and conditions that have moved Palestinian popular music from the roads and yards of Palestinian peasantry to the archives and studios of Palestinian urban centres. In a way of summary, this chapter will end up with an analytical description of the state of Palestinian popular music at the time of writing.