Introduction to Jewish Music

Taught Spring 2021 for the Music and Jewish Studies Departments at City College of New York

Course Description: The music of the Jewish people has persistently oscillated between preserving tradition and embracing innovation, just as it has traversed the full spectrum of sacred and secular sounds. This survey course offers an introduction to global and local iterations of Jewish musical history in both its historical and contemporary contexts. The musical traditions discussed will extend from ancient Israel through the modern period, and include many areas of the Diaspora, such as Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. Lessons will consist of lectures, discussions, multi-media selections, live demonstrations, guest speakers, and (virtual) field trips. Previous musical background is not required for this course.

¹ Image and quotation excerpted from “100 Greatest Jewish Songs Ever,” Tablet Magazine, December 21, 2010, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/songs-of-songs.

Music of New York: Sounding the Immigrant Experience

Taught Summer 2020 for the Music Department at New York University

Course Description: New York has long borne poet Walt Whitman’s aphorism “a city of the world” for its vibrant history as a receiving center and home to extraordinarily diverse populations from around the globe.¹ The geography of the city is such that national, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities who have never before encountered one another find themselves living in close quarters here. In recent years, political discourse has revitalized century-long conversations about who is allowed to come to America and what it means to be an American.

This six-week intensive course offers a survey of the ways in which music and sound shaped immigrants’ encounters with this city and with each other. Focusing on the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, we will explore how groups such as the Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, African Americans, and Hispanics imported their own sonic cultures, and/or adopted, grappled with, or rejected new musical traditions in New York. Probing encounters with diversity, gender, class, and sexuality, as well as the historical contexts of xenophobia, urban development, and technological advancement, we will take an interdisciplinary approach to investigating questions about identity, memory, and modernity.

To bring these vibrant scenes to life, students will experience New York’s soundscape by discussing, listening to, reading about, and virtually visiting significant people, places, and compositions of the past and present. Students will gain familiarity with the techniques of primary source study including oral history collection, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork and participant-observation. Course readings, discussions, assignments, and assessments will be supplemented with visits from guest speakers, as well as online trips to relevant local sites. No prior knowledge of music is required.

¹ The phrase “a city of the world” derives from Walt Whitman, “City of Ships,” in Leaves of Grass (1867, ed.), http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1867/poems/176.

² Image of Children Singing on the Roof of the Educational Alliance from The American Way: The Story in Pictures of the Educational Alliance and Its Work, Educational Alliance collection, undated, 1895-1993 *I-359, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History.