Early Sounds of Jewish Music

Early Sounds of Jewish Music is a rare journey into the Jewish soundscape of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Featuring international scholars, our program will be in two parts: An interactive symposium with leading scholars and practitioners of Jewish Early Music, and a collaborative concert with the UCLA Musicology Early Music Ensemble.

There are limited written sources of Jewish music prior to 1800. The extant documents show a wide range of influences in the Middle East and Europe. Creating the sounds of early Jewish music scholars and performers develop clues from handwritten textual documents and musical notation. Our program will combine the scholarly presentation of information and ideas along with performance. This will include performances by the UCLA Musicology Department’s Early Music Ensemble. The repertoire discussed and presented will include 16th and 17th Century Yiddish songs, liturgical music from Amsterdam in the 18th Century along with German synagogue music from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. This unique program will bring to light unique and hidden sounds.

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE, 1:00pm-4:30pm

“For the Joy of the Soul: Rediscovering Early Jewish Music” (Dr. Diana Matut ).

1:00-1:45pm

For the longest time, the story of Early Jewish Music began and ended with Salamone Rossi, great Jewish composer from Mantua, and colleague of Claudio Monteverdi. His Hebrew madrigals were considered the pinnacle and rarest of exceptions in the world of Jewish music before 1800.

Yet Jewish music-making between 1500 and 1800 encompassed music for all walks of life, functions and occasions. It was performed in sacred and secular spaces, in the synagogue, at home, on the streets and even in non-Jewish settings. This lecture will introduce the music of Ashkenazi and Italian Jewish communities of that period, its rediscovery and sources, and will feature communal singing of Hebrew and Yiddish songs from the 1600s.

Roundtable: Jewish Early Music in Performance, 1:45pm-2:30pm

Panelists: Diana Matut, Paul Feller, Matt Austerklein, Marilyn Winkle

Moderator: Mark Kligman

Coffee / Schmooze (with beautiful ambient music) 2:30pm-3:00pm

New Horizons in Jewish Early Music Research (15 min presentations with 5 min each for questions)

3:00-4:30pm

• • Matt Austerklein – “Michtam L’David: Confessions of a Sixteenth-Century Klezmer” “
  • Diana Matut: “Singing for a Groom and Bride in Early Modern Ashkenaz”
  • Mark Kligman: “Eighteenth-Century Styles of Hazzanut in Germany”
  • Paul Feller-Simmons: “Reclaiming Esther for Sephardic Amsterdam”

Closing 10 min