Music and Minorities from Around the World

Music and Minorities from Around the World

Music and Minorities from Around the World: Research, Documentation and Interdisciplinary Study Edited by Ursula Hemetek, Essica Marks and Adelaida Reyes

Music and Minorities from Around the World: Research, Documentation and Interdisciplinary Study, Edited by Ursula Hemetek, Essica Marks and Adelaida Reyes This book is a double blind peer-reviewed edited volume based on the ICTM Study Group Meeting Music and Minorities in 2012 in Zefat/Israel This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright 2014 by Ursula Hemetek, Essica Marks, Adelaida Reyes and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6620-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6620-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements... vii Editors Introduction... viii Part 1: Methodology in the Study of Music and Minorities Fieldwork on Music and Minorities: Methodological Considerations... 2 Gerda Lechleitner Part 2: Music Education and Cultural Identity in Minority Groups The Role of Choirs and Songbooks of the Sorbian Minority: A Stronger Identity Awareness through Music Education... 18 Tereza Nowak Culture and Education: Musical and Cultural Aspects in the Teaching Methods of Two Arab Music Teachers in Israel... 25 Essica Marks The Circular Flow of South Indian Music and Dance... 47 Yoshitaka Terada Shima-uta Recordings and Competitions as a Conservatory of Living Music in the Amami Islands... 72 Yves Defrance Part 3: Music and Minority Nationalisms Constructing Patrimony, Updating the Modern: Toward a Comprehensive Understanding of Sephardic Musical Experiences in France... 94 Jessica Roda Sense or Absence of Nationalism: Searching for a Swiss-Jewish Musical Identity... 115 Sarah Ross

vi Table of Contents Part 4: Representation of Minority Musics in Film and Video Music and Race in American Cartoons: Multimedia, Subject Position, and the Racial Imagination... 142 Thomas Solomon Jews, Jazz, Early Cinema in America and Stalin s Russia... 167 Inna Naroditskaya The Construction of Roma Identity in Finland: Considerations on Film and Music Productions... 186 Kai Viljami Åberg Contributors... 216

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION The ICTM Study Group Music and Minorities has held international symposia regularly every two years since 2000. Papers from these symposia have been published in different formats. Some have appeared as proceedings, others as edited online publications (see www. ictmusic.org) and still others as a collection of articles developed from selected papers originally presented at the conference and peer-reviewed in accordance with standard practice for scholarly publications. All have been made possible through the generosity and guidance of the local organizers of the meetings. Inevitably, the symposia and the publications that come out of them bear the marks of their setting. Zefat Academic College is situated in the Galilee in the Northern area of Israel. Historically this area has been inhabited from antiquity until the present. Numerous archaeological sites provide abundant evidence of the countless generations of peoples with different religions and cultures who have lived there. Augmenting the Jewish groups that had been residents of the Galilee for generations are the Jewish communities from Romania, Hungary, Morocco, Iraq, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and India, as well as immigrants who arrived in recent decades from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia and Argentina. Other groups living in the region are Druze, Circassians, Christian Arabs and Muslims (including Bedouins). Today, the Galilee s population is richly diverse, its communities and cultures creating a socio-cultural mosaic that is complex and challenging. Zefat, therefore, proved a highly suitable setting for a symposium on topics that are central to the work of the Music and Minorities Study Group. In that setting, Zefat Academic College provided an excellent venue for presenting and exploring the scholarly work of the Study Group. In Zefat Academic College in its student body, its faculty and its personnel most if not all of the region s minority populations are represented. Students from all departments were invited to participate as listeners and observers at the international conference. Students from the Music and Arts Department came to the lectures and their reactions were very positive. The College, therefore, became a site for the mutual enrichment of the local and the global of Zefat Academic College and an

Music and Minorities from Around the World ix international symposium with participants from three continents: Asia, Europe and the United States. The contemporary city of Zefat is steeped in the heritage of the sacred literature and poetry of its great Jewish philosophers and mystics of past centuries. At the same time, a new generation is seeking to build on that legacy through the pursuit of higher education. In that endeavor, Zefat Academic College plays a central role. And in the enactment of that role, the College s hosting of the Seventh International Symposium of the Music and Minorities Study Group promises to have an important and long-lasting impact. The contents of this book are organized according to the themes of the symposium: Methodology in the study of music and minorities, Music education and cultural identity in minority groups, Music and minority nationalisms, Representation of minority musics in film and video. The theme Methodology in the study of music and minorities reflects developments in the work of the Study Group. Since the Group s inception, many important case studies have been presented, each rich in ethnographic detail and analytical insight. Where do they lead us collectively? A sustained effort is needed to go beyond individual cases toward a generalized and theoretical understanding of the relationship between music and minorities. Gerda Lechleitner tries to add to these discussions by theorizing fieldwork in a particular minority context Bukharian Jews in Vienna. She suggests that one aspect of fieldwork cultural understanding ranks high in studying music and minorities. The theme of education is a very important one in the history of the Study Group. It appeared for the first time in 2006 at the Varna meeting in Bulgaria and re-entered the list of conference themes in 2010 in Hanoi. In this book we find a broad range of approaches to the topic: from the use of choir books to skyped lessons to competitions as forms of transmission. The article about the Sorbian minority in Germany by Tereza Nowak looks at a certain feature of transmission within a minority group that has a very typically European, maybe especially German, history: choir singing and songbooks as an important means of identity construction. Essica Marks writes about teaching Arab music in Israel. In this and Tereza Novak s case studies, we find very different pedagogic approaches that both seem to work. Yoshitaka Terada introduces what he calls circular flow a phenomenon involving the movement of musical traditions from country of origin to other parts of the world and back using South Indian music as illustration. That recordings and competitions are an important means of transmission of the genre Shima-uta in the Amami islands in Japan is strongly suggested by Yves Defrance s paper.

x Editors Introduction The theme Music and minority nationalisms seeks to address an issue of particular significance: the multi-faceted role that music can and does play in the creation and maintenance of minority nationalisms. The two articles that address the theme deal with Jewish traditions, one in Switzerland, the other in France. Sarah Ross, in her article, focuses on original as well as newly invented songs written in Surbtal-Yiddish, in order to demonstrate how Swiss Jews in their attachment to their past and present culture are trying to create not only a Swiss-Jewish national essence in their music, but even more, a Swiss-Jewish minority nationalism. Jessica Roda analyzes the situation of Judeo-Spanish music in France by applying the concept of patrimonization. At the beginning of the 20 th century during the Ottoman Empire crisis, the Jews of the region, mainly Judeo-Spanish, began to construct an identity for the purpose of distinguishing themselves from any future national majority. In this process, what Roda calls heritization was the principal tool. Three articles in this volume take highly divergent approaches to the theme Representation of minority musics in film and video as they address the question of how minority cultures and their musics are reflected in and are affected by motion pictures, be theyictional movies, documentaries, ethnographic films, music videos, shared Internet video files or interactive videos. Thomas Solomon s article explores sonic racial stereotyping in American animated films from the 1930s through the 1950s. Using Nicholas Cook s (1998) theory of musical multimedia as a starting point, Solomon analyzes some specific examples of cartoons in order to explore how music, language, and the moving image work together to create racialized characterizations. In her article, Inna Naroditskaya carries out a comparative analysis of two film productions: The first American talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), and the first Soviet film musical, Jolly Fellows (initially Jazz Comedy, 1934), both take jazz and Jews as subject matter. The article explores how these two cinematographic hits each signify their respective national agendas and the quite-contrasting social aspirations of the time while simultaneously conveying the Jewish story. Finally, Kai Aberg s article deals with the influence of film and music production on The Construction of Roma Identity in Finland, using techniques and formats from both past as well as contemporary productions. We thank the authors for their wonderful contributions, the anonymous peer reviewers whose work was very helpful for the editing process, the language editor Rachel-Shelli Mansfeld, Mike Delaney for the copyediting and Martina Krammer for formatting the text. May this volume

Music and Minorities from Around the World xi contribute to the ongoing international dialogue on minorities in ethnomusicology. Ursula Hemetek, Essica Marks, Adelaida Reyes (eds.) Vienna, Zefat, New York in July 2014