Jewish Studies and Music Working Group from the American Musicological Society
Moderated by Mark Kligman (UCLA)
Amanda Ruppenthal Stein (Carroll University)
Judentum and Das Judentum: Rethinking the Narrative on 19th century German Jewish Art Music
Musicologists agree that the concept of “Jewish music” has varied historically, geographically, and theoretically throughout scholarship and criticism. Jewishness can be and has been musically expressed in different ways in different periods, and the concept of Jewishness in art music confounds easy categorization. Whereas the earliest antisemitic travel journals printed across Europe described pervasive “noise” in synagogue worship and Richard Wagner’s Das Judentum in der Musik (1850, revised 1869) decried art music infected by Jewishness and Judaism, later nineteenth and early twentieth scholarship from Eduard Birnbaum and Avraham Zvi Idelsohn reclaimed Jewish music, writing of music infused with Jewish spirit and soul. My presentation draws on my dissertation, Sounding Judentum: Assimilation, Art Music, and Being Jewish Musically in 19th Century German-Speaking Europe (Northwestern University, 2021), in which I challenged existing scholarly narratives on Jewish composers and musicians of the long nineteenth century, drawing attention to how scholarly language and qualifiers that define “Jewish music” have problematically overgeneralized, overemphasized, or written out a large group of composers and performers. Friedrich Gernsheim (1839-1916), a member of the Brahmsian circle, serves as a case study to explore new understanding of how to navigate the sounding one’s Judentum—Jewishness, Judaism, or Jewish identity—together with one’s Deutschtum in the long nineteenth century.
Ann Glazer Niren (Indiana University Southeast)
Four Sabras: A Family Portrait
Many of Leonard Bernstein’s compositions have become staples of the twentieth-century American musical canon, yet there are still a few of his pieces which are relatively unknown. One such work is Four Sabras for solo piano, which, at first blush, seems to be designed for students, because of its relative simplicity. The title of this piece has several meanings: a sabra is both a cactus fruit and a native Israeli—hard and prickly on the outside and soft and sweet on the inside. Likely written after a return from Israel, Bernstein also uses the term to depict his family in each of the four movements: “Ilana, the Dreamer” for his sister, Shirley, “Yosi, the Jokester,” references his brother, Burton, “Idele the Chassidele” showcases his father, Sam, and “Dina, the Tomboy who Weeps Alone” features his mother, Jennie. Four Sabras stems from the Bernstein tradition of dedicating works to those in his inner circle, such as Anniversaries, or modeling characters after relatives, as shown inTrouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place. Through an examination of materials from the Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress and several monographs on Bernstein and his relatives, this talk will investigate the movements of Four Sabras and explain how they illustrate Bernstein’s parents and siblings. Four Sabras is a piece that deserves to be recognized for its value as a pedagogical tool for young pianists, and because it sheds light on four of the people closest to Leonard Bernstein—his family.
Samantha M Cooper (Harvard University)
The Undesirable in Box 14: Jewish Men and the Making of the Metropolitan Opera House, 1880-1940
When the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company permitted Jewish financier Otto H. Kahn to acquire ownership of Opera Box 14 in 1917, they acted in direct opposition to their earlier vow to keep their opera boxes out of “the hands of undesirable persons.” Archival and press findings reveal that Jewish men proved instrumental to the Metropolitan Opera House’s operations between its autocratic incorporation in 1880 and its democratization in 1940. Attending to the experiences of these dual “undesirables” and “essentials” at the Met, I argue, can help us to better understand the fraught nature of minoritarian interactions with American cultural institutions.
Biographies
Musicologist Amanda Ruppenthal Stein, Ph.D. is a lecturer in music at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin and at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a recent graduate of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, where she was also the Crown Graduate Fellow for the Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. She also holds degrees in Clarinet Performance and Music History from the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Amanda’s dissertation, Sounding Judentum: Assimilation, Art Music, and Being Jewish Musically in 19th Century German-Speaking Europe focused on how art musicians approached Jewish identity, assimilation, and acculturation through sonic expression, relationships, and writing. Additional teaching and research interests include Jewish voice in the music of Leonard Bernstein, the comedy albums of Allan Sherman, and cross-cultural conversations on religious and racial identities. In 2019, Amanda traveled twice to Uganda to conduct fieldwork in collaboration with a solidarity mission and recording project of Cantors Assembly, celebrating 100 Years of the Abayudaya Jewish community in Uganda.
Dr. Ann Glazer Niren serves on the faculty at Indiana University Southeast where she teaches special topics in the history portion of the music education curriculum, the four courses in the music history sequence for majors, as well as music appreciation for non-majors. During her time at IUS, she has received three awards for excellence in teaching. Her research centers on the influence of Jewish music on Leonard Bernstein’s life and works, but she has also examined jazz, Kentucky music history, and minimalism. Additionally, she has investigated the correlation between mental illness and creativity, teaching as performance, and the importance of humor in various aspects of the classroom. Dr. Niren’s work appears in the forthcoming Bernstein in Context, as well as The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Journal for the Society of American Music, American Music, Notes: Journal of the Music Library Association, Jazz and Culture, The College Music Symposium, American Jewish Archives Journal, and The Journal of Synagogue Music.
Dr. Samantha M. Cooper is a historical musicologist who specializes in American Jewish cultural history. She received her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology at New York University in May 2022 for her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Cultivating High Society: American Jews engaging European Opera in New York, 1880-1940.” In Fall 2022, Samantha will be a Harry Starr Postdoctoral Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University, where she will work on her first monograph, tentatively titled Undesirables in the Diamond Horseshoe: A Jewish History of the New York Opera Industry. Samantha’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Jewish History, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, P.E.O. International, the American Academy for Jewish Research, and Temple University’s Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. Her first article, “I’d Rather [Sound] Blue: Listening to Agency, Hybridity, and Intersectionality in the Vocal Recordings of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand” was published in The Journal of the Society for American Music in 2022, and her next article, “Emma Goldman, An Anarchist at the Opera” is forthcoming in American Jewish History. Samantha currently serves as the Associate Executive Director of the Jewish Music Forum, a Project of the American Society for Jewish Music.