UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology

The world of secular Jewish music has endured considerable change over the past 30 years. What started with a small group of American Jewish musicians searching for their cultural roots in the late 1970s spawned the now global “klezmer revival.” In the mid-1990s, avant-garde composer/musician/impresario John Zorn started commissioning artists to record for the Radical Jewish Culture series of his record label, Tzadik. The musical styles represented on this series range from relatively straightforward classical and jazz, to klezmer, folk, and world music, to highly avant-garde free-improvisation and experimental music. The music produced on this series has met with some controversy, primarily over the issues of “Jewish” musical style and content. Some have questioned the music’s rootedness in Jewish tradition, and thus have opened a debate about what exactly “Jewish music” is.

This course explores the Radical Jewish Culture phenomenon as it relates to current themes in ethnomusicology (e.g. music and identity, hybridity/appropriation, sociology of music) and Jewish cultural studies (diaspora, identity, assimilation, etc.). In addition to academic writings in the aforementioned areas, we will also be reading interviews, press articles, and articles written by musicians who’ve been a part of the klezmer revival and Radical Jewish Culture. Through focused listening assignments, we will look at how these recordings use visual, textual, and aural symbols to signify and construct Jewishness. As we attempt to grasp the creative diversity and cultural significance of this movement, we will consider the idea of “Jewish music” and its importance to Jewish identity, and explore the role music plays in culture more generally.