New music written by or about Jews no longer abides by exoticisms, national paraphernalia, or the prestige of “art music.” Instead, growing disillusioned with (or disinterested in) ideological apparatuses and tropes of Otherness, composers navigate through signs associated with Judaism while introducing new ethnographies in the form of fieldwork recordings, simulations of their oral behavioral patterns, or their entextualizing. With this they steadily undo the modernist divide between ethnography and art. The talk will situate the proliferation of contemporary Jewish art music in the ecosystem of new music, focusing on works by Chaya Czernowin, Heiner Goebbels, and Olga Neuwirth while considering the historiographical impact of the recordings released by the Milken Archive.

This event is made possible by the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music 

Musicologist Assaf Shelleg specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, focusing on Jewish art music across modern and contemporary compositional practices. Shelleg is the author of the award-winning book Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History (Oxford University Press, 2014), Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (Oxford University Press, 2020) and, most recently, The State of Afterness: Contemporary Music in and about Israel (Oxford University Press, 2025). Previously the director of the Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel at the Hebrew University, he has also served as a curator for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and as a music contributor for Haaretz. Shelleg’s new book Jewish Art Music as Art Music is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2026.