This talk/recital marks the launch of Classical and Popular Music in Israel (Eastman Studies/URP), with an illustrated introduction by British musicologist Malcolm Miller, surveying the volume and offering a concise orientation to Israeli art and popular music—transcultural dialogues, canon and identity, and performance contexts. The recital features Iris Malkin (mezzo-soprano), Neal Stulberg (piano), and Malcolm Miller (piano), including the USA premiere of songs from Oded Zehavi’s Resonating Voices, and works by Yehezkel Braun, Paul Ben-Haim, and Josef Tal.

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

Malcolm Miller is a musicologist and pianist, honorary associate and associate lecturer at The Open University, UK, and Editor of Arietta, Journal of the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe. He has published widely on Beethoven, Wagner, and contemporary music, including a monograph, Boundaries, Space and Register in Beethoven’s Piano Music (Boydell & Brewer, 2025) and as editor of the volume of essays Classical and Popular Music in Israel (Eastman Studies in Music, URP, Boydell, 2025).

Miller was recipient of a Jewish Music Institute (JMI) Millennium Award for his project ‘Piano Music by Composers in Israel’, and Director of Research of the Forum for Israeli Music of the JMI at SOAS, University of London, where he co-organised the conference Art Musics of Israel in 2011. Recent chapters on Jewish Music include a study of correspondence between Paul Ben-Haim and the family of Otto Crusius in Jüdische Musik im süddeutschen Raum (2021); “Ancient Symbols, Modern Meanings: The Use of the Shofar in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Music,” in Qol Tamid: The Shofar in Ritual, History, and Culture (2017); and “Bloch, Wagner and Creativity: Refutation and Vindication,” in Bloch Studies (2016). He also co-edited Beethoven the European: Transcultural Contexts of Performance, Interpretation and Reception (Brepols, 2023) and Music and Exile: From 1933 to the Present Day (Brill, 2023).