Distinguished American Musicologist Philip Bohlman Visits Monash
December 2008
Sponsored by Monash University’s School of Music-Conservatorium, School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, and Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, and the Musicological Society of Australia.
Professor Philip Bohlman, the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities and of Music at the University of Chicago will be an Honorary Fellow of the School of Music-Conservatorium, Monash University in December, 2008. He will also be a guest of Monash University’s Centre for Jewish Civilisation and School of English, Communication and Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts.
In addition, during his visit he will present the keynote address at the National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia on 4th December at 4.15pm, entitled “Music before the Nation, Music after Nationalism”. Venue: Melba Hall, University of Melbourne (Details of lecture below).
Public Lecture and Concert: Jewish Music in Exile
Monday 8th December 2008
8.00pm, Building A, Room A1.34 (The Clayfield Room)
Caulfield Campus, Monash University
Professor Philip Bohlman’s and Mrs Christine Bohlman’s visit to Melbourne is sponsored by Monash University’s School of Music-Conservatorium, School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, and Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, and the Musicological Society of Australia.
RSVP essential: (03) 9902 0771 or acjc@arts.monash.edu.au Limited space available. Light refreshments will be served.
A highlight of his visit will be Philip Bohlman’s public lecture: “Jewish Music in Exile”. It will be followed by a concert performance of a Melodrama from the Concentration Camps by Philip and Christine Bohlman, at Monash University’s Caulfield campus on December 8th. Refreshments will be provided. The Lecture and Concert will be co-presented by the Centre of Jewish Civilisation and the School of Music - Conservatorium.
Background to the Public Lecture on Jewish Music in Exile
Philip Bohlman writes: After many years of studying Jewish music as a product of and response to diaspora, I have more recently begun to consider the ways in which exile represents a more radically form of disjuncture in Jewish musical practice and history. Just as the symbols of diaspora enter Jewish ritual and musical practice (e.g., the return of shechina each week in the Sabbath service), so too does exile assume attributes of ritual and popular practice (e.g., in the enactment of music and theater in the purimshpil). In this paper, I draw upon practice of my own, or rather, the performance and recording projects of the Jewish cabaret ensemble, the “New Budapest Orpheum Society,” for which I serve as Artistic Director. The exile repertories that we perform and that we have recently recorded (the new CD, So That Their Voices Will Not Fall Silent, should appear in December 2008) have led us to explore repertories that represent the social disjuncture and disintegration of exile in new ways. We juxtapose different repertories in unexpected ways, blurring the borders of Jewish music to enhance their permeability. The question of identity is no longer one of continuity until the time of return to the homeland, but rather one of survival, transformation, and hidden cultural transcripts. The case studies to which I turn and whose musics I sound will come from the Jewish metropole in the early twentieth century, the ghetto and concentration camp of the Holocaust, and the revival movement of the early twenty-first century.
Concert: A Melodrama from the Concentration Camps
Philip Bohlman (narrator) and Christine Wilkie Bohlman (pianist) will perform the last work that was composed in Hitler’s concentration camps. Composed at Terezin, the work is entitled: Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (The Chronicle of Love and Death of the Flagbearer Christoph Rilke). The work is a monodrama for speaker and piano that is a Czech variant of the melodrama tradition. Both Ullmann and Rilke were Czech, and Terezin is located in what is today the Czech Republic.
Keynote Address at the National Conference of MSA
Professor Bohlman’s address on 4th December is entitled “Music before the Nation, Music after Nationalism”.
As nationalism emerged as a discourse of modernity in the wake of the Enlightenment and the spread of colonialism, it both shaped and was shaped by the aesthetic and social meanings of music. My address examines the longue durée of modern capitalism as a complex and shifting form of discourse and social practice, constituted of fragments and contradictions rather than a single set of centralized policy and power. I am concerned, therefore, with a metaphysics that begins with music before the nation. The larger historical process that I follow begins with Johann Gottfried Herder in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it stretches to the twenty-first century. And the globalization of music, particularly popular world musics. Anchoring that historical arc will be Herder’s Volkslieder at one end and national song movements, particularly the Eurovision Song Contest, at the other.
My focus will be on specific shifts in ontological discourse about music as acts of inventing music by giving it names that invoke the nation. Herder, for example, proposed a vast array of genres and repertories in his writings, posing questions about whether folk songs, hymnody, and listening subjectivity could connect people to places. In the nineteenth century, the search for national musical essences turned to vast collections projects, many effectively generating metaphors that stood in for the nation, and yielding power to projects that socially redeployed borders and colonies in the twentieth century. I conclude by asking whether music has become so fully embedded in and with nationalist meanings that it survives within a dramatically new metaphysics after nationalism.
Biography of Philip V. Bohlman
Philip Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities and of Music at the University of Chicago, where he also holds adjunct positions in the Divinity School, Germanic Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Southern Asian Studies. His teaching and courses cover a broad range, with special interests in music and modernity, folk and popular music in North America and Europe, Jewish music, music of the Middle East and South Asia, music and religion, and music at the encounter with racism and colonialism. A pianist, he is also the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret and Ensemble-in-Residence at the University of Chicago. He has written and published extensively, and among his most recent books are World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002; translated into five languages), The Music of European Nationalism (ABC-CLIO, 2004; 2nd revised edition, Routledge, 2008), Jüdische Musik – Eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte (Böhlau, 2005), and Jewish Music and Modernity (AMS Studies in Music, 2008). Among his recent edited volumes are Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, 2000; with Ronald Radano), Music in American Religious Experience (Oxford, 2006; with Edith Blumhofer and Maria Chow), and Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New (Chicago, 2008). The New Budapest Orpheum Society has released the CD, Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano (Cedille Records, 2002), and will release So That Their Voices Will Not Fall Silent: Jewish Cabaret in Exile (Cedille) in early 2009. Current book projects include Music Drama of the Holocaust, Herder on Music and Nationalism, and Wie könnten wir des Herrn Lied singen in fremdem Lande? Philip Bohlman was awarded the Edward Dent Medal by the Royal Music Association in 1997, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin in 2003, and the 2007 Derek Allen Prize for Musicology by the British Academy, to which he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow in 2007.
Biography of Christine Wilkie Bohlman
Christine Bohlman is Lecturer in Piano and Chamber Music at the University of Chicago. A pianist with special interests in chamber music and the keyboard music of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, she has studied with Menachem Pressler, Carroll Chilton, Howard Karp, Kenneth Drake, Aiko Onishi, and Russell Sherman, taking her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance from the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University, and studying in the doctoral program at the University of Illinois. She held several positions before moving to the University of Chicago, including MacMurray College, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Merit School of Music in Chicago, where she also served as Chair of Music Theory. Most recently, she has performed at Bard College, the University of Pittsburgh, New York University, Yale University, University College Cork, Ohio State University, and the Warburg Institute in London. During the 2008–2009 academic year, she will perform internationally in Melbourne, Berlin, and Vienna, as well as for the Jewish Community of Minneapolis-St. Paul. With Philip Bohlman she is preparing a recording of Viktor Ullmann’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, the final work for stage composed in the concentration camp at Terezín.