About the project

Music and anti-Semitism converge at many points. In musicology, composition, criticism, theory, and performance, anti-Semitism has always been present, and most likely always will be.

Most studies that combine the two concepts fall largely into three groups: the antisemitism of Richard Wagner, and whether this should affect the performance of his music; anti-Semitism against Felix Mendelssohn, and the pressures of assimilation; and music during the Holocaust. Whilst these topics are deeply interesting, and should not be excluded simply for their preeminence, they are clearly not the full picture.

Anti-Semitism is pervasive in a society even if it is not acted out by anti-Semites. To me, at least, purely the fact of being Jewish in a non-Jewish world amounts to a crisis in self-confidence and a lack of complete trust in others. There does not need to be an authoritarian regime: being self-aware as a Jew - and being aware that at least one other person is aware - is enough.

Musically speaking, this means that to any self-aware Jew there is a knowledge that without much effort it would be easy to characterise - and likely dismiss - their music as 'Jewish'; even if not explicitly, this can be done through anti-Semitic tropes. I was struck by this point during a recent lecture on minimalism, in which the criticisms of the genre were outlined. Many were dismissive of minimalist music's imitation, its pandering to the consumer, its appeal to mass culture and eschewal of 'proper' musical attributes. With two of the most prominent minimalist composers - and many other less famous ones - being Jewish (Steve Reich and Philip Glass), it is easy to compare this criticism with both  tropes of the 'capitalist Jew' and classical ideas of a Jewish lack of originality in music. Of course, the topic would need to be researched further to get a better idea, but the easiness of the comparison shows just how pervasive - and normalised -  anti-Semitism in music criticism is.

That said, my reading on the topic so far has not been extensive. Two books are on order from Blackwells, courtesy of a generous College book grant: K.M. Knittel's 'Seeing Mahler', and Michael Marissen's 'Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion'. Hopefully both will give a wider outlook of the problem, as well as providing ideas of how anti-Semitism in music criticism can be conceived as a whole, outside of specific examples.

Hopefully the blog will cover reviews of and thoughts emerging from these books, as well as any other literature and ideas I find along the way. There is quite a bit out there, and not all of it is labelled explicitly: just this week I came across an article on Mendelssohn which raised interesting questions about the Jewish core of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (including Ferdinand David, Ferdinand Hiller, Ignaz Moscheles) and their relation to non-Jewish musicians. At some point, as well, I will have to read Wagner's famous tract, and also learn German. Eventually, I hope to be able to give a grounded overview of how antisemitism manifests in music scholarship, composition, criticism, and theory; possibly also performance, though I cannot imagine how just yet.

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