Israeli Composers between Jewishness and the World

FAIN: FT-60368-12

Ronit Seter
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Fairfax, VA 22031-3533)

NEH Summer Stipend 2012 will support the writing of two chapters for my book "Israeli Composers between Jewishness and the World." (On 9/27/11, it received full approval for a contract offer from Oxford University Press.) This book tells the story of Israeli composers of art (serious, concert, "classical") music: Paul Ben-Haim, Josef Tal, Mordecai Seter, Betty Olivero, and others from the nation's founding to the present. As in Bartok's work, nationalism, orientalism, and folklorism intersect in their music to define a national style. Israel's art music, however, treats these elements as dichotomies: it simultaneously defies and adheres to a distinct nationalist project; it embraces the Orient as both Self and Other; and its folkloric base is both local and international. During the Stipend time, I will focus on Israeli-American composers: Chaya Czernowin (Harvard University) and Jan Radzynski (Ohio State University), whose Grove entries I wrote, and Shulamit Ran.