The Department of Music Studies, at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, is pleased to announce a lecture by Professor Edwin Seroussi from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Andalusian Hebrew Music. This lecture will be held on Thursday 3 May 2018 at 11:00 in Music Room OH 124.
Students, academics and the general public are cordially invited to attend.
Andalusian Hebrew Music refers to the setting of Jewish texts to diverse genres of music that are nowadays conceptualized as “Andalusian.” This presentation is dedicated to this musical encounter between Muslim and Jewish cultures as it took shape in the Maghreb (and in the Maghrebi Jewish diasporas) from the fourteenth century to the present.
The medieval Andalusian Jewry was an Arab-speaking culture immersed, especially among the elites, in the Arab arts and adapting them to the Hebrew language. The massive immigrations from Iberia to the Maghreb that took place following the percussions of 1391 and the final expulsion of 1492 reinforced the presence of the Andalusian Jewish stock, consisting by the end of the fifteenth century of Romance speakers, in the Maghreb. The new incomers settled especially in the northern cities of the coast (especially in Tetuan), in the imperial centers of Fez and Meknes and in Western Algeria. In the course of time, Andalusian Jews moved to southern Morocco, to cities such as Marrakesh and Essaouira.
Such a millenary-shared life cannot be perceived exclusively through the lenses of modern categories of ethnic and religious identity. Arab and Berber followers of Moses and Muhammad inhabited a common space. Unequal power relations between them, reflected in periodical persecutions and massacres, were not detrimental to their sharing cultural capitals on the long term. This understanding of Jewish-Muslim relations circumvents modern idealizations of convivencia. It rather derives from a sober interpretation of daily strategies of living together in spite of the periodical upheavals in their mutual relations across the centuries.
Eventually after centuries of living and creating music in shared spaces, the twentieth century witnessed the ending of most of the Jewish presence in the Maghreb. France, Canada, and particularly Israel are now the vibrant centers where Andalusian Hebrew musical traditions can still be heard.
The lecture will be illustrated with several recorded examples of diverse genres of Andalusian Hebrew Music.
Edwin Seroussi is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor of Musicology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Director of the Jewish Music Research Centre since 2000. He has previously taught at the Department of Music of Bar Ilan University and established and directed the School of the Arts at the Hebrew University. He has been a visiting professor at several institutions, such as the University of California at Berkeley, Moscow University, Institut für Mussikwissechaft in Zürich, Harvard University, University of Chicago and Dartmouth College.
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Prof. Seroussi immigrated to Israel in 1971 where he studied at the Department of Musicology at the undergraduate and graduate levels continuing into his doctoral studies at the University of California Los Angeles (1981-1987). As a faculty member of the Department of Musicology at The Hebrew University, he teaches ethnomusicology, world music, theory and methodology in the study of oral traditions and popular music. Besides his academic activities he is active in the music scene of Israel and abroad in diverse capacities as music producer, member of state committees in music and Israel’s representative at the International Music Council (UNESCO).
His research focuses on the musical cultures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, interactions between Jewish and Islamic cultures (specifically in art music genres) and popular music in Israel exploring process of hybridization, diaspora, nationalism and transnationalism. He has published on all these subjects, founded Yuval Music Series and is editor of the acclaimed CD series Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel.
