Music & Minorities

(Shabbat) Angels in America: Israel Goldfarb, “Shalom Aleichem,” and the Search for Nusach America

Rachel Adelstein — 2023-10-10

Contemporary American synagogue congregations love to sing a flowing melody for the hymn “Shalom Aleichem” to welcome the Sabbath on Friday evenings. The song has entered the Jewish folk tradition, and speaks to singers of home and nostalgia. However, the song’s history and construction reveal both its genesis in an American Jewish community in the midst of a significant transformation of nation and practice and the crucial role that it played in bringing that community together and forming the basis of a truly American style of Jewish worship. I approach this song on two fronts. My primary approach is historical, delving into the immediate circumstances under which Rabbi Israel Goldfarb composed the song in May of 1918, and the broader forces affecting Jewish religious life in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. I address changes taking place in American Jewish life, generation gaps between American Jews, and the rise of the Jewish education movement, and I demonstrate how Goldfarb’s song reached a significant audience of adults and children alike and helped to address these transitional challenges in Jewish life. My secondary approach is socio-cultural. I ask why this particular one of the many melodies that Goldfarb composed caught the American Jewish imagination and became a foundation of contemporary American synagogue song. Its mode and its structure reveal Goldfarb’s compositional skill at combining both Jewish and Western elements into a flexible song that children could learn and pass on to their children, creating a folk song through generations of use. Taken together, these approaches demonstrate how a four-stanza hymn could pave the way for the development of an American Jewish soundscape.

Stories of Songs, Choral Activism and LGBTQ+ Rights in Europe

Thomas R. Hilder — 2023-01-01

This paper attends to choral activism and LGBTQ+ rights in Europe. Drawing on models in a post-Stonewall US context, LGBTQ+ choirs have appeared since 1982 in urban centres throughout Europe, employing a range of repertoire, adopting innovative performance practices, and enacting public interventions. These choirs can affirm positive LGBTQ+ identities, create safer spaces, build local LGBTQ+ communities, offer sites of healing and sharing about different LGBTQ+ experiences, and increase visibility in the aid of LGBTQ+ rights (Balén 2017; De Quadros 2019; MacLachlan 2020). While LGBTQ+ rights may have become “a powerful symbol of Europe” (Ayoub and Paternotte 2014: 3) in the popular imagination and in the EU public discourse, in the last decade, new nationalist formations, increased violence toward LGBTQ+ people, and divisions within an apparent LGBTQ+ community have rendered queer Europeans at a critical juncture just as the project of Europe itself begins to crumble. As an activist within, and researcher of a European LGBTQ+ choral music scene, I will share with this paper stories of songs, choirs, festivals and choral networks inspired by Rita Felski’s notion of “hooked” (2020). Drawing on several years of ethnographic research in the UK, Italy and Poland, I ask: How have LGBTQ+ choirs shaped and been shaped by the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights locally, nationally and transnationally? What stories do these choirs tell us about the power of songs to bring about wider social transformation? How might LGBTQ+ choirs offer models of care, community and advocacy in a continent in crisis? Discussing an array of issues and cases – the Various Voices festival, the London Gay Men’s Chorus and the Cromatica network – and the potentials of applied methods, I invite us to listen to LGBTQ+ choral singing as a form of activism that continues to transform European 21st century politics and society.

Ultimele cântece bătrânești din Olt / Last Old Songs From Olt, by Various Artists, recorded and annotated by Speranţa Rădulescu

Margaret H. Beissinger — 2023-03-24

Writing on Water: The Sounds of Jewish Prayer, by Judit Niran Frigyesi

Isabel Frey — 2023-03-24