Books by Assaf Shelleg
Oxford University Press, 2025
The State of Afterness traces the histories and cultural histories of contemporary music in Israe... more The State of Afterness traces the histories and cultural histories of contemporary music in Israel since the 1980s and through the 2020s. With afterness defined as the state of being unconditioned by territorialism while opting for previously unavailable temporalities and ethnographies, Assaf Shelleg studies the compositional approaches that record the attenuation of territorial nationalism, and assembles a network of composers trained in the post-ideological climate of the 1970s and 80s. This network features operas, electronic music, orchestral, and chamber and ensemble works by Chaya Czernowin, Betty Olivero, Luciano Berio, Leon Schidlowsky, Josef Bardanashvili, and Arik Shapira, in addition to Jewish oral musical traditions and novels by David Grossman, A. B. Yehoshua, Yishai Sarid, and Ruby Namdar.
While in previous eras the statist subject superseded or subsumed any competing political project, since the 1980s such self-referential acts have been losing their ability to confer homogeneity and project the monologic of national Hebrew culture and its telos. As a result, Shelleg writes, the composers discussed in this book do not form a cohesive group, yet they share constituent cultural and historical sensibilities: they opt for diasporism irrespective of their compositional approaches but refrain from universalizing Jewish diasporas (as did classic Zionism); they display postmodern patrimonies but reject their essentialist qualities; they admonish their country's ethnocracy and democratic façade; they denationalize Holocaust memorialization; and they narrate the failure of territorial nationalism. In this sense, the state of afterness is a drama still etched in our everyday.
Theological Stains offers the first in-depth study of the development of art music in Israel from... more Theological Stains offers the first in-depth study of the development of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a bold and deeply researched account, author Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers. He argues that Israeli art music, caught in the tension between a bibliocentric territorial nationalism on the one hand and the histories of deterritorialized Jewish diasporic cultures on the other, often features elements of both of these competing narratives. Even as composers critically engaged with the Zionist paradigm, they often reproduced its tropes and symbols, thereby creating aesthetic hybrids with 'theological stains.'
Drawing on newly uncovered archives of composers' autobiographical writings and musical sketches, Shelleg closely examines the aesthetic strategies that different artists used to grapple with established nationalist representations. As he puts the history of Israeli art music in conversation with modern Hebrew literature, he weaves a rich tapestry of Israeli culture and the ways in which it engaged with key social and political developments throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In analyzing Israeli music and literature against the backdrop of conflicts over territory, nation, and ethnicity, Theological Stains provides a revelatory look at the complex relationship between art and politics in Israel.
German translations of "Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History" (New York: Oxf... more German translations of "Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Translated by Felix Kurz.
Prefaced by Edwin Seroussi.
"ewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History revolutionizes the study of modern Isra... more "ewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History revolutionizes the study of modern Israeli art music by tracking the surprising itineraries of Jewish art music in the move from Europe to Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Leaving behind clichés about East and West, Arab and Jew, this book provocatively exposes the legacies of European antisemitism and religious Judaism in the making of Israeli art music.
Shelleg introduces the reader to various aesthetic dilemmas involved in the emergence of modern Jewish art music, ranging from auto-exoticism through the hues of self-hatred to the disarticulation of Jewish musical markers. He then considers part of this musics' translocation to Mandatory Palestine, studying its discourse with Hebrew culture, and composers' grappling with modern and Zionist images of the self. Unlike previous efforts in the field, Shelleg unearths the mechanism of what he calls "Zionist musical onomatopoeias," but more importantly their dilution by the non-western Arab Jewish oral musical traditions (the same traditions Hebrew culture sought to westernize and secularize).
And what had begun with composers' movement towards the musical properties of non-western Jewish musical traditions grew in the 60s and 70s to a dialectical return to exilic Jewish cultures. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, which reaffirmed Zionism's redemptive and expansionist messages, Israeli composers (re)embraced precisely the exilic Jewish music that emphasized Judaism's syncretic qualities rather than its territorial characteristics. In the 70s, therefore, while religious Zionist circles translated theology into politics and territorial maximalism, Israeli composers deterritorialized the national discourse by a growing return to the spaces shared by Jews and non-Jews, devoid of Zionist appropriations.
TOC
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Jewish Contiguities; Translocated Pasts Facing the Levant
1. Hava Nagila? Decentering the Eastern European Soundscape
Jewish Inversions
Aesthetic Confines
Rethinking Bloch
Disarticulating Jewishness
Historiographical Silhouettes
Control Cases
In Lieu of a Summary
2. From Pre- to Post-Statehood: Hebrewism Diluted
Ringing the Bells and Whistles of the Zionist Project: National Musical Onomatopoeias
Adjacent yet Oppositional: Subversive Hebrewists
Statehood and the Demise of Romanticist Nationalism
Destabilizing Western Metaphors of the East
Consuming the Source
Thematic Incongruities (or, Violating Kairological Time)
3. 1960s-1970s: Articulating Jewishness in Israeli Art Music
1967
Enter the New Pioneers
The Multivocal Negation of the Diaspora and its Dissolution
Avni: Counterpointing Modes of Memory
Epitaph for Whom?
Kopytman: Transcribing Jewish Heterophonies
Hebrewism Diluted: Judaism Deterritorialized
Seter: Muting Oneself
4. Reshuffling Historiographical Cards
Notes
Index"
Articles by Assaf Shelleg
Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 2024
“Jerusalem 1968; Meaningful Disharmonies,” in Jerusalem Transformed: Politics, Culture, and Hidde... more “Jerusalem 1968; Meaningful Disharmonies,” in Jerusalem Transformed: Politics, Culture, and Hidden Corners (Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXXIV), ed. Richard I. Cohen, 105-118. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies, 2023
“Adamot—Art Music—Israel,” in The Oxford Handbook for Jewish Music Studies, ed. Tina Frühauf, 39-... more “Adamot—Art Music—Israel,” in The Oxford Handbook for Jewish Music Studies, ed. Tina Frühauf, 39-69. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Transcribing Disnarration
Opera Quarterly, 2024
The article studies the network and mediators extending from Chaya Czernowin’s first opera, Pnima... more The article studies the network and mediators extending from Chaya Czernowin’s first opera, Pnima…ins Innere (1998-9). Pnima draws on David Grossman’s Hebrew novel See under: Love (1986), which it nevertheless mutes in its entirety. With no libretto, with voiceless actors on stage, and vocal sonorants projected from the orchestra pit, reading of this opera as a musical corollary to second-generation literature or as an oblique study of trauma risks endowing narrow hermeneutic gamut to the non-representational aesthetic that typifies Czernowin’s oeuvre. The article opens with the literary, textural, and textural qualities of Grossman’s novel in addition to its denationalization of the holocaust, and moves to consider post-ideological climate that preceded and informed it; this was the same climate during which Czernowin received her training at the Tel Aviv University Music Academy. Studying at an ecosystem disillusioned with Zionism, Czernowin’s sonic designs betray comparable disbelief in representational paradigms, but her textural narration of the Holocaust in Pnima saw the effacing of imagery whose signifiers remained partly exposed, as they transcribe the realities of their representation rather than the immediate symbolism pertaining to the representations of their realities. Czernowin subsequently speaks of the novel while culling, paraphrasing, and acoustically transcribing Grossman’s sonic wordings into a network of ciphers and garbling sieves.
Rabbi Nachman’s Sonic Schemes
Religions, 2024
This article discusses Tzvi Avni’s Second Piano Sonata, Epitaph, a sonic commentary on one of the... more This article discusses Tzvi Avni’s Second Piano Sonata, Epitaph, a sonic commentary on one of the inner tales in Rabbi Nachman’s “The Seven Beggars”. Written between 1974 and 1979, Epitaph not only marks the composer’s act of translation (from words into music and from a textual tale into a wordless and semantically unmarked piano sonata) but also his very turn to ethnographic sources that defied their negative function in a national territorial culture that vilified otherness while separating art from ethnography. Avni’s turn to Rabbi Nachman was part of a bigger shift that saw composers’ dialectical returns to Jewish histories and cultures that were previously repressed from a national culture which dehistoricized the Diaspora to the point of rendering the times and cultures of diasporic Jews a single temporality—ahistorical, contextless, and outside the teleological time of Zionism. With the (re)introduction of diasporic temporalities, non-redemptive poetics became an affordance in the music of Avni or Andre Hajdu (who is also discussed here) while steadily muting the territorial tropes that constituted Hebrew culture.
Israel Studies 28/1, 2023
Ideally this article should be titled “decomposing Hebrewism,” except that by the turn of the twe... more Ideally this article should be titled “decomposing Hebrewism,” except that by the turn of the twenty-first century composers in Israel were past the point of opposing the tropes that constituted Hebrew culture and the territorial paradigms that had conditioned it. Still, the two composers under discussion here—Betty Olivero and Chaya Czernowin—do not offer more-of-the-same stand-ins in the monolithic form of representations or identities (gender identities included); nor are there common stylistic traits that could reason their joint appearance here (and their gender, needless to say, would be a poor excuse). In fact, it is despite their unequivocally different aesthetic penchants that we can point to artistic perceptions which mute national territorial tropes, disable the Zionist management of Jewish history, and opt for non-redemptive poetics—all while drawing on Jewish musical traditions or modern Hebrew literature. Looking at (and listening to) Olivero and Czernowin’s works, this article discusses the modern and postmodern patrimonies that steer their writing while situating both in the aftermath of Hebrew Culture. Knowingly circumventing the playing of identity cards or the displaying of peripheral masks, Olivero and Czernowin’s musics signal a constituent shift toward simultaneities, multiplicities, defacing of musical signifiers, and the unmarked semiotics of cultural spaces that are bluntly incongruent with the national.
"The music histories signaled by (and in) Mordecai Seter’s notebooks"
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2022
Spanning more than 2700 pages, the notebooks Mordecai Seter had written between 1952 and 1993 fea... more Spanning more than 2700 pages, the notebooks Mordecai Seter had written between 1952 and 1993 feature more than to-do lists, teaching schedules, and other errands involving the musicians and functionaries that performed, published or broadcast his music. The notebooks disclose dozens of stylistic self-analyses (whose growing volume in the 1960s and 1970s would signal a creative impasse) alongside numerous citations from books on Jewish mysticism, esotericism, symbolism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, modernism, art history, and musicology that Seter repurposed as borrowed autobiographical snippets. Combined, these two facets shed new light on his aesthetic shifts as well as on the stipulations of the historiography of art music in Israel. And as unsung chapters of Seter’s autobiography unfold, they also thicken the biography of a bigger ecosystem, unconditioned by notions of peripherality or Otherness.
Hebrew Studies, 2019
Introduction to the symposium.
Imploding Signifiers: Exilic Jewish Cultures in Art Music in Israel, 1966–1970
Hebrew Studies, 2019
Whereas the music Mordecai Seter wrote in 1966 marks a clash between his un-signified semiotic pr... more Whereas the music Mordecai Seter wrote in 1966 marks a clash between his un-signified semiotic procedures and the national redemptive trajectories that animated them, Andre Hajdu’s music in 1970 knowingly staged unwanted sonic adjacencies of the Jewish Eastern European sound- scape alongside Christian music from late medieval Europe. Both com- posers sought de-signification—either by eschewing ethnographic imports in the form of folk or liturgical music (Seter), or through violent decon- structions of seemingly opposing earmarks of Jews and Christians (Hajdu). Both works therefore disclose meaningful disharmonies. They manifest the disabling of Zionist tropes (while still rendering them present) and the con- comitant reclaiming of the ethnic specificity of diasporic Ashkenazi culture.
Acta Musicologica, 2019
Discussing Josef Tal’s works during the transition into Israeli statehood, the article uncovers t... more Discussing Josef Tal’s works during the transition into Israeli statehood, the article uncovers the way the annals of art music in Palestine/Israel duplicated the Zionist allegory and conditioned the studies that followed them. While it was fairly easy to “otherize” Tal’s penchant for post-tonal designs and non-representational aesthetic in a cultural constellation that prioritized the (euphonic) immediacy of national sig- niers, his works embody both the internalization of national constructs and their destabilization. Contextualizing this simultaneity is the wider discussion on the gap between national rhetoric and the manufacturing of cultural hybrids as well as thehistoriographical paradigms that have shaped the eld of art music in Israel. With these key variables in mind Tal’s music can be reconsidered alongside the disillu- sionment with romanticist Zionism in modern Hebrew poetry (already during the interregnum of statehood) and the way political dates have punctuated a cultural history that precedes and traverses 1948.
Anklänge 2018: Teaching Music History of the 20th and 21st Century in Academic Setting, eds. Juri Giannini, Julia Heimerdinger, Andreas Holzer. Hollitzer: Wien, 2019., 2019
Alle Rechte vorbehalten Die Abbildungsrechte sind nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen geprüft worden.... more Alle Rechte vorbehalten Die Abbildungsrechte sind nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen geprüft worden. Im Falle noch o ener, berechtigter Ansprüche wird um Mitteilung des Rechteinhabers ersucht.
עיונים בתקומת ישראל, 2018
עיונים בתקומת ישראל , 2017
When Josef (Tal) Laughed; Notes on Musical (Mis)representations
AJS Perspectives , 2016
Entwined Voices: On Andre Hajdu's Shloshim
Jewish Music Research Center, 2016
Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 2016
Discussing mechanisms of representation in modern Jewish art music in general and post- Holocaust... more Discussing mechanisms of representation in modern Jewish art music in general and post- Holocaust commemoration music in particular, the article examines the dilution of musical signs in Holocaust-related works penned by Israeli composers Noam Sheriff, Ruben Seroussi, and Tzvi Avni. Written within the span of thirteen years, between 1985 and 1998, these works include Sherrif’s (b. 1935) Mechaye Hametim (He Who Revives the Dead, 1985); Seroussi’s (b. 1959) A Victim from Terezin (1995; based on excerpts from Gonda Redlich’s Terezin diary); Avni’s (b. 1927) Se questo è un oumo (1998; a setting of poems by Primo Levi); and Avni’s From There and Then (1994–1998). The compositions under discussion unfold a continuum of aesthetic approaches ranging from postromantic trajectories that stitch musical signs on nationalist teleological constellations (Sheriff), through conscious non-redemptive formulations (Seroussi), to compositional emphases on the migration and translocation of Jewish musics rather than affixed signs of otherness (Avni). The dilution of Jewish musical markers not only attests to the composers’ abandoning of representational apparatuses, but also necessitates a broader look at the dialectical movement of Jewish musics before, during, and after the Holocaust, lest these sounds become objectified or otherwise overshadowed by nationalist constellations.
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Books by Assaf Shelleg
While in previous eras the statist subject superseded or subsumed any competing political project, since the 1980s such self-referential acts have been losing their ability to confer homogeneity and project the monologic of national Hebrew culture and its telos. As a result, Shelleg writes, the composers discussed in this book do not form a cohesive group, yet they share constituent cultural and historical sensibilities: they opt for diasporism irrespective of their compositional approaches but refrain from universalizing Jewish diasporas (as did classic Zionism); they display postmodern patrimonies but reject their essentialist qualities; they admonish their country's ethnocracy and democratic façade; they denationalize Holocaust memorialization; and they narrate the failure of territorial nationalism. In this sense, the state of afterness is a drama still etched in our everyday.
Drawing on newly uncovered archives of composers' autobiographical writings and musical sketches, Shelleg closely examines the aesthetic strategies that different artists used to grapple with established nationalist representations. As he puts the history of Israeli art music in conversation with modern Hebrew literature, he weaves a rich tapestry of Israeli culture and the ways in which it engaged with key social and political developments throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In analyzing Israeli music and literature against the backdrop of conflicts over territory, nation, and ethnicity, Theological Stains provides a revelatory look at the complex relationship between art and politics in Israel.
Translated by Felix Kurz.
Prefaced by Edwin Seroussi.
Shelleg introduces the reader to various aesthetic dilemmas involved in the emergence of modern Jewish art music, ranging from auto-exoticism through the hues of self-hatred to the disarticulation of Jewish musical markers. He then considers part of this musics' translocation to Mandatory Palestine, studying its discourse with Hebrew culture, and composers' grappling with modern and Zionist images of the self. Unlike previous efforts in the field, Shelleg unearths the mechanism of what he calls "Zionist musical onomatopoeias," but more importantly their dilution by the non-western Arab Jewish oral musical traditions (the same traditions Hebrew culture sought to westernize and secularize).
And what had begun with composers' movement towards the musical properties of non-western Jewish musical traditions grew in the 60s and 70s to a dialectical return to exilic Jewish cultures. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, which reaffirmed Zionism's redemptive and expansionist messages, Israeli composers (re)embraced precisely the exilic Jewish music that emphasized Judaism's syncretic qualities rather than its territorial characteristics. In the 70s, therefore, while religious Zionist circles translated theology into politics and territorial maximalism, Israeli composers deterritorialized the national discourse by a growing return to the spaces shared by Jews and non-Jews, devoid of Zionist appropriations.
TOC
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Jewish Contiguities; Translocated Pasts Facing the Levant
1. Hava Nagila? Decentering the Eastern European Soundscape
Jewish Inversions
Aesthetic Confines
Rethinking Bloch
Disarticulating Jewishness
Historiographical Silhouettes
Control Cases
In Lieu of a Summary
2. From Pre- to Post-Statehood: Hebrewism Diluted
Ringing the Bells and Whistles of the Zionist Project: National Musical Onomatopoeias
Adjacent yet Oppositional: Subversive Hebrewists
Statehood and the Demise of Romanticist Nationalism
Destabilizing Western Metaphors of the East
Consuming the Source
Thematic Incongruities (or, Violating Kairological Time)
3. 1960s-1970s: Articulating Jewishness in Israeli Art Music
1967
Enter the New Pioneers
The Multivocal Negation of the Diaspora and its Dissolution
Avni: Counterpointing Modes of Memory
Epitaph for Whom?
Kopytman: Transcribing Jewish Heterophonies
Hebrewism Diluted: Judaism Deterritorialized
Seter: Muting Oneself
4. Reshuffling Historiographical Cards
Notes
Index"
Articles by Assaf Shelleg