"Exploring 'Conversations': Musings and Tunes Rooted in the American Jewish Cultural Landscape"
The Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Music is set to embark on a year-long exploration of the personal and cultural aspects of American Jewish music with their "Conversations" series. This weekly series, presented by the Center at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, aims to stimulate conversation, new listening, and debate about the life and meaning of American Jewish music.
The chief author of "Conversations" is also a research fellow with the Lowell Milken Center. Daniela Smolov Levy, a lecturer at the University of Southern California, will delve into the under-researched area of Jews in opera, accompanying each lecture with a post reflecting her research.
The series will broaden its scope with guest authors, whose identities will be announced in due course. These authors will open up a network of diverse but interconnected musical worlds, shedding light on various aspects of American Jewish music.
Recently, the Milken Archive of Jewish Music has acquired a family scrapbook and a cache of recordings from the Malavsky Family Choir. Expect posts exploring the Malavsky Family Choir, led by Cantor Samuel Malavsky and featuring Goldie Malavsky, and how Jewish Americans used music to create spaces for "outsiders" to become authorities. The changing attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the early 20th century will also be a focus, influencing the sound and culture of cantorial music.
The Kwartin Project will feature regular updates about the translation and analysis of Cantor Zawel Kwartin's Yiddish language autobiography, Mayn Lebn, with a focus on the material and social conditions that led to the cantorial "golden age" and the pop culture phenomenon of star cantors.
Simone Salmon's research on Sephardi music and the post-Ottoman diaspora will also be presented in "Conversations".
In addition, "Conversations" will offer a musical census, illuminating lineages and helping to imagine the futures of American Jewish music through reports from present-day artists and stories culled from the archive. Dispatches from Brooklyn will provide updates from the multiple worlds of Jewish music in Brooklyn, NY, including cantorial lessons with elder cantors, the klezmer scene, and the world of Chassidic music.
The series will also expose artefacts of the pandemic period that continue to mediate between in-person and online experience in the world of music and musicians.
Lastly, "Conversations" will host regular guest posts from young scholarly voices in the fields of musicology and Jewish Studies, further enriching the series with fresh perspectives and insights.
Join us as we delve into the personal and cultural stories connected to American Jewish music, exploring themes of identity, heritage, language, and music within the American Jewish community. Stay tuned for updates on the upcoming "Conversations" series!
The "Conversations" series, delving into the under-researched area of American Jewish music, not only offers learning opportunities through educational materials like the translation and analysis of Cantor Zawel Kwartin's autobiography but also expands to include diverse opinions from scholars in the fields of musicology and Jewish Studies, fostering a vibrant interchange of ideas that merges education-and-self-development and entertainment. The series, showcasing a wealth of musical talent and historical artifacts, also embraces the digital age with online-education resources and posts exploring the impact of the pandemic on music, highlighting the convergence of traditional entertainment with modern technology.
