Search

This paper reflects on the Music Archive of Monash University’s (MAMU) experiences working in Aceh and Lampung, Indonesia and the ways they inform our practices when closely liaising with communities at risk of disaster. To support local cultural continuity and revitalization, and especially in the wake of the 2004 tsunami and the 2018 volcanic eruption respectively, MAMU became an early proponent of making digital repositories freely available online. As technology has progressed, so too have MAMU’s efforts to engage with and support the cultural preservation of its collections’ source communities. One of the archive’s latest projects includes the creation of detailed 3D scans of historical musical instruments in the collection, potentially enabling instrument makers to discover previously lost construction techniques. This paper will explore some of the many ways that archives such as MAMU can be used to support cultural continuity in areas experiencing trauma and upheaval.

Australian-born Miriam Rochlin collaborated with Polish emigres Reuben Swiatlo in 1947 and Yehuda Grynhaus around 1949 to produce, privately, a number of 78 rpm recordings of Yiddish songs in Melbourne. The recordings are housed in the Australian Archive of Jewish Music at Monash University. During each collaborative process, Rochlin was the piano accompanist, Swiatlo and Grynhaus were both vocalists. The article makes a case for an accompanist being recognized as a true collaborator in performance, and investigates one song from each partnership to demonstrate selected musical interactions between singer and pianist. By all accounts, the two songs chosen are unique to Melbourne and therefore raise the possibility of the performers also collaborating as composers/lyricists. A focal point of the discussion are the lyrics of the two songs, the subtleties of the language used and the cathartic effects of thenarratives on the targeted audience of the day, namely Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors from Europ...

Misirlou 1 is widely recognized as an icon of surf rock, a category that, together with surf pop, constitutes the surf music genre that emerged in 1961. Surf music reflected and gave expression to the rather short-lived idealistic and carefree existence of ‘white’ urban youth culture in Southern California before the social and political changes of the psychedelic, conscience-ridden counterculture era took hold. However, while Misirlou is an iconic example of a specific musical age and genre, it is also found in other ages and cultural traditions. It has been described as a Lebanese belly-dance melody, a popular Greek song, an Arabian serenade, a ‘Terkisher’ (Turkish piece) in Klezmer repertoire, and is now known to many as the theme from the film Pulp Fiction. In each case, the style and language of lyric (when there is one) adjusts to milieu, but the melody is always recognizably the same. The journey of Misirlou from folk music to the global surf rock idiom of the 1960s is in itself a narrative worth r...

Picture if you will an early music ensemble in Australia playing a particular brand of Jewish music found in Bulgaria but actually stemming from medieval Spain. And there you have a taste of the rich and historically colourful musical gems presented in The Sephardic Experience. This four-CD anthology reflects the gradual kindling of musicological interest in the relatively neglected field of Jewish music and musical activity in Australia. (The two volumes not reviewed here are ‘Gazelle and Flea’ and ‘Eggplants’.)