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Jewish Music in the Asia-Pacific Region

Participants: Gay Breyley, Kay Dreyfus, Kerrin Hancock, Margaret Kartomi, Bronia Kornhauser

The Jewish Music Research Group has a scholarly focus on the Asia-Pacific region, an area that has been largely ignored in Jewish music research. The group aims to create an awareness of the insights that Jewish music can provide about the inter-relationships within Jewish communities, between those communities and host societies and about diaspora theory as a whole. Research in this area is supported by the collections in the Australian Archive of Jewish Music (AAJM). Collaborative projects are a feature of this group. Although archival materials collected to date emphasise the activities of Ashkenazi communities within Australia, pioneering research has also been undertaken in the Sephardi and related Judeo-Babylonian streams. For further information and sound samples of items from the AAJM, go to http://arrow.monash.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Index. Digitised files of Jewish music that has been collected in the field or donated by individuals and groups have also been deposited in Monash’s Large Research Data Store (LaRDS). The Jewish music collection has been showcased in LaRDS as an example of the facility’s very important function of preserving scholarly resources. Visit the site at http://www.monash.edu.au/eresearch/showcase/lards.html

Publications and Conference Papers, 2004–2008/9

Ethnomusicology Forum

Book (forthcoming)
Gay Breyley, Memory, Music and Displacement in the Minor Memoirs of Evelyn Crawford, Ruby Langford Ginibi and Lily Brett, New York: Mellen Press (contracted 12 January 2009).

Book Chapters
Bronia Kornhauser, “Conserving a past for the consolidation of the present: aspects of Jewish music culture in Melbourne in the 1960s’, in Seamus O’Hanlon and Tanya Luckins eds, Go! Melbourne in the Sixties, Beaconsfield: Melbourne Publishing Group, 87-100.

Refereed Journal Articles

Gay Breyley, ‘Diasporic transpositions: indigenous and Jewish performances of mourning in twentieth-century Australia’, Ethnomusicology Forum 16.1 (2007): 95-126. (This article also appears as a chapter in Tina K Ramnarine, ed, Musical Performance in the Diaspora, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 95-126.)

Kay Dreyfus, ‘“I cannot find a corner in the world where I am welcome.” The Australian war-time experience of the Weintraub Syncopators,’ Journal of Musicological Research, 26.2-3 (2007): 281-314.

Kerrin Hancock, ‘Jewish liturgical music of South Africa: transmission in the Orthodox community of Melbourne”, in Kay Dreyfus, and Joel Crotty eds, Music, Migration and Multiculturalism. Victorian Historical Journal, 78.2 (2007): 272-85 (with Kay Dreyfus).

Margaret Kartomi, ‘Tracing Jewish-Babylonian trade routes and identity through music, with reference to seven versions of a song of praise melody’, Ethnomusicology Forum 13.1 (2004): 75-100.

Bronia Kornhauser, “‘The Yiddish are coming! The Yiddish are coming!: The reshaping of Melbourne’s Jewish community from 1980 to 1939’, in Kay Dreyfus, and Joel Crotty eds, Music, Migration and Multiculturalism. Victorian Historical Journal, 78.2: 206-27.

Collaborative Research Projects

2004,

  • Silk, Spice and Shirah: Musical Outcomes of Jewish Migration into Asia c.1780-c.1950, special issue of the journal Ethnomusicology Forum 13/1, (Kay Dreyfus with Margaret Kartomi), 168 pp.
  • “Musical outcomes of Jewish migration into Asia via the northern and southern routes c.1780–c.1950,” Ethnomusicology Forum 13/1: 3-20 (Margaret Kartomi and Andrew D. McCredie).
  • ‘From Berlin to Bondi: the Journey of the Weintraub Syncopators’, HEAT 8: 14–33 (Margaret Kartomi, John Whiteoak and Kay Dreyfus).
  • ‘Reconstructing the vanished musical life of the Shanghai Jewish diaspora: a report’, Ethnomusicology Forum 13/1: 101-18 (Tang Yating with Kay Dreyfus).

    2007

  • Out of Babylon: The Music of Baghdadi-Jewish Migrations into Asia and Beyond, Celestial Harmonies CD 13274-2, with 60-page booklet of musicological commentary and analysis (Bronia Kornhauser and Margaret Kartomi).
  • ‘A case of discontiguity: musical and cultural irony in the situation of the Jewish community of Shepparton, Victoria, pre-World War I to post- World War II”, in Fiona Richards ed, The Soundscapes of Australia: Music, Place and Spirituality, London, Ashgate, 117-46 (Kay Dreyfus and Bronia Kornhauser).

    Conference Presentations

    Margaret Kartomi, ‘“By the rivers of Babylon”: the liturgical music-culture of Babylonian Jews in their colonial and post-colonial diasporas and its precursor in medieval Mediterranean society as depicted in the Cairo Geniza”, at the 7th Meeting of the Study Group for the Anthropology of Music in Mediterranean Culture, Venice, 28-30 June 2007.

    Bronia Kornhauser

  • ‘Australian Archive of Jewish Music’, at the International Association of Music Libraries Conference, Sydney, 1-6 July 2007.
  • ‘Misirlu and the question of musical identity”, at the 31st National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia, Melbourne: 4-7 December 2008.

    Kerrin Hancock

  • ‘The transplantation of South African Jewish liturgical music in Melbourne’, paper presented to the Research Work in Progress Seminars, School of Music, September 2007. A revised version of this paper was presented at the 52nd Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology 2007 at Columbus, Ohio, USA.
  • ‘Responses of South African liturgical music to the local social and cultural conditions in Melbourne”, Musicological Society of Australia National Conference, University of Melbourne, December 2008.
  • Paper to be presented at the conference of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) in Durban, South Africa, July 2009.

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