Fw: Jewish music?

[robert wiener <wiener...>]

I wrote to Yehuda Yannay, a contemporary Israeli composer, now at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  (You can read more about him at
http://www.uwm.edu/People/yannay/ .)  I asked if the music on his CD
(i.e., Nine Branches of the Olive Tree, Seven Late Spring Pieces, Duo
for piano and violonncello, and Trio) could be considered Jewish
music.  Here is his response:

-----Original Message-----
From: Yehuda Yannay <yannay (at) csd(dot)uwm(dot)edu>
To: robert wiener <wiener (at) mindspring(dot)com>
Date: Wednesday, December 30, 1998 6:53 PM
Subject: Re: Jewish music?


>Dear Bob:
>    Thank you for your letter. A great amount of words and ink has
been
>spent on the issue.  There music by Jews and Jewish music to begin
with
>wide range of personal expressions by one composer...For example, my
>series of works based on the late Paul Celan, the greatest post war
poet
>in German, is Jewish music? We are both Romanian Jews, originally. My
>latest work for percussion  based on Kabbalistic texts is Jewish
>music-there are no melodies. I have written only a handful of pieces
>with explicit Jewish themes. Is the music of say Babbitt and Perle,
or
>Ligeti and Kurtag (with both I share the Romanian/Hungarian-Jewish
>background) recognizable as being Jewish.?
>    Or, can one recognize that a piece has been composed by a women?
I
>also get also this question..
>    Your question is an important one. Please read Alexander Ringer's
>book
>Arnold Schoenberg, The Composer as a Jew. Perhaps Ringer's book can
give
>some answers or help us to ask the right questions.
>
>Best,
>Yehuda Yannay
>
>PS   Creative artists in Israel, even if they write in Hebrew, have
the
>same cosmopolitan aspirations
>
>