Re: effect on music

[Alex J. Lubet <lubet001...>]

When I performed my piece Bosnia Blues at UBC in Vancouver, whose text draws
parallels between the Holocaust and the  slaughter of Bosnian Muslims, I was
harangued by a drunken faculty member who asked me how I dared make such a
connection.  The audience was troubled by her loutish behavior but for the most
part probably sympathetic to her views.

The Edmonton Sun, btw, refers to the folks most of us call suicide bombers (I
appreciate the terms homicide bombers and the less common genocide bombers) as
martyr bombers.  Don't mean to rag on your country Judith--I'm Canadian on my 
mom's
side--but there's some troubling stuff up there (and, of course, elsewhere).



Judith Cohen wrote:

> hi, re the question of the effect of politics on music:
> In Spain in the late summer or early fall there was a short-lived suggestion 
> on
> a Spanish folk music discussion list to boycott "all Jewish music". After
> someone else said Jewish music was such a wide concept that how could anyone 
> be
> sure what it was and wasn't they dropped the idea. But another reason,
> unstated, for dropping the idea was simply that at the same time as they
> unilaterally, and without exception (in my experience) denounce Israel with no
> opening for historical or any other kind of discussion, the same musicians do
> very well recording their own versions of Sephardic songs, which in most cases
> they know absolutely nothing about but see as a legitimate marketing tool,
> as "part of our Spanish historical heritage". Harsh? I guess. But I've been
> around Spain many years and it's what I see. My own CD has done well which I'm
> mentioning ONLY because remarks were made by one person on the list about "a
> certain woman of the Hebrew race who makes sure her Jewish music cd sells well
> in our country", meaning me.
>
> When an Israeli musician was invited to perform, by the Israeli Embassy in
> Madrid, the coffee house that booked him for an auxiliary performance wouldn't
> announce him as "Israeli" or even "Jewish" (this was in the spring of
> 2002) "for security reasons".
>
> The European Day of Jewish Culture music (and other) events were cancelled in 
> a
> small town which vaunts itself as particularly supportive of its Jewish
> historical heritage, and its friendship with the Israeli EMbassy: they also
> denied having cancelled the events, even in local papers. The tourist office
> told me and others it had been cancelled "because of Palestime." Several other
> places either cancelled their invented-Jewish-festival events or seriously
> consdiered cancelling them but in the end decided to go ahead. Several are
> going ahead this year, mostly with a tourism-marketing approach which has
> characterized them all along ("recovering our medieval Sephardic heritage by
> dresisng up as picturesque medieval Jews and singing 18th and 19th century
> Judeo-Spanish songs" style).
> The October 2002 ethnomusicology conference included a very one-sided graduate
> student paper about anti-Israel protest songs among Palestinians, which no one
> challenged for its unprofessional biases; and a splendid, barely-attended
> performance by the legendary Bukharan Jewish singer and dancer Tofakhon (most
> people knew neither that she was Jewish nor indeed that she was performing; it
> was the first day, at lunchtime).
> After the conference there were weeks of discussion by email regarding the 
> bias
> of a resolution that one of the organization's sections was proposing, which I
> won't go into here because it isn't directly music related: but it did show 
> how
> prejudiced supposedly objective ethnomusicologists are when it comes to 
> Israel.
> (I certainly put my two cents into that one....)
>
> In Canada, so far I haven't seen any problems and the splendid peace concert 
> in
> June 2002 will have a sequel, though not organized by the same people, as an
> evening of music and engagement, February 6th, in Toronto, with Jewish and 
> Arab
> musicians participating.
>
> And security, which the June concert didn't have.
>
> That's what there is to report from what I know.  Judith
>

--
Alex Lubet, Ph. D.
Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music
Adjunct Professor of American and Jewish Studies
Head, Division Of Composition and Music Theory
University of Minnesota
2106 4th St. S
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612 624-7840 612 624-8001 (fax)


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