Search

Fromental Halevy's grand opera La Juive was one of the most successful operas of its time following its premiere at the Paris Opera in 1835. Its theme of religious conflict was full of political meaning for nineteenth-century critics, but as political and social contexts shifted over time, the opera lost its political impact and the genre of grand opera became unfashionable. How was it, then, that politics resurfaced in the reception of the Metropolitan Opera's revival production of La Juive in 2003? This article examines how a focus on Jewishness in this production re-established the opera's political dimension, and suggests that the political interpretation of grand opera is not restricted to a specific point in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the Radical New Jewish Culture music festival organized by the Knitting Factory in Manhattan, New York City. The event has brought Jewish music and heritage into a polycultural experimentalist scene shaped by jazz, rock, and avant-garde concert music. It has served as a conceptual framework from which to interrogate the relationship between musical language and the semiotics of sound. Producers have created a program that juxtaposed signs of radicalism and orthodoxy.

The article presents the text of the lecture titled "What is Jewish Music?" by composer Stefan Wolpe, delivered at the Jewish Music Forum of the Society for the Advancement of Jewish Musical Culture in New York on February 29, 1940. According to Wolpe, the question What is Jewish Music? reveals itself in a technic of composition. As he learned in Palestine, the common trait of the songs is that they all strive for specific intervallic groupings, their inversion, variants and transposition. Pentatonic elements are sometimes recalled in Palestinian songs, says Wolpe.

The article discusses the differences on musical traditions in the Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. Hasidic music is rooted in the musical aesthetics of Jewish Eastern Europe. Music is a special significance in Hasidism, as part of their form of communication with God (Nigunim). Differences were due to traditional evolutions on each sect and developments of other substantial communities within the cities of America, Israel, and Europe.