Scholarship Shmolarship

I recently applied for a scholarship (which will not be named). The interview was uncomfortable - mainly because there were no representatives from the humanities on the panel - and reaffirmed the arguments that this blog has been espousing.

As supporting documents for the application I submitted a personal statement which talked about issues of antisemitism* in music as my main area of interest; a link to this blog was also included in my CV. I would hope that all of the panelists read both, but it seems the message was lost.

One panelist obviously thought they were on the ball, asking confidently: 'Should we listen to Wagner?'. This is an worn and somewhat irrelevant. Firstly, music taste is highly personal: you can listen to Wagner if you like, or not if you don't like. Secondly, I don't believe that most people who listen to Wagner (or indeed programme Wagner's music in concerts or for broadcast) do so politically. What matters more is how we talk about Wagner. For one, repeating the question of 'Wagner: yes or no' as a litmus test of anti-racism is a sure-fire way of reducing antisemitism in music to one source. As written in other posts, there are plenty of other, more subtle ways in which antisemitism manifested and manifests in music. Focusing on Wagner shifts all discourse onto him; it gives him control of the situation; it valorises him as a figurehead whilst really the problem is and always has been pervasive.

The second moment of disconcertion came when discussing my compositions. In my personal statement and CV I had made no reference to any sort of Jewish content, form, or inspiration for my composing or compositions; I didn't even mention I was Jewish! One of the panelists, however, reckoned that because I was interested in Jewish musicology and antisemitism - or because of my name? - I must be, and asked about my 'Jewish compositions'. This I found particularly offensive. They followed it up by asking if I use 'liturgical music' in my compositions. I answered that I was not really interested in sacred Jewish music, but in the secular forms, where points of contact with the non-Jewish world afforded antisemitism. This seemed confusing to all the panelists, who seemed to have pigeonholed all my musical activity as 'Jewish' because of my research interest.

What I learnt from this is that for non-Jews and non-musicologists, the problems of antisemitism in musicology are largely incomprehensible. It seems the line in my statement  '[I] hope that by exposing anti-Semitic tropes, more effort can be made to avoid their off-the-cuff use, making music a safer space for the expression of cultural identity.' did not rub off at all. Antisemitism through ignorance, lack of cultural sensitivity, and generalisations are rampant; it would be interesting to talk to other British Jewish composers about their experiences of this kind of language. 

Unsurprisingly given my flustered answers I did not receive the scholarship.


*I have started using the non-hyphenated form of the word after reading a couple of things which noted that 'Semitism' is not a real thing; using a hypen lends credence to the pseudoscientific (and mis-attributed) concept. If anything, I am anti 'Semitism', but this might cause too much confusion

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