Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City

Phil Alexander

Offers a fresh perspective on klezmer music in Germany that moves away from the previously dominant themes of guilt, appropriation, and Jewish absence
Analyzes musical examples that illustrate the new diversity and complexity within contemporary klezmer
Draws from in-depth interviews with Berlin's leading klezmer and Yiddish musicians

Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City

Phil Alexander

Description

How can a traditional music with little apparent historical connection to Berlin become a way of hearing and making sense of the bustling German capital in the twenty-first century? In Sounding Jewish in Berlin, author Phil Alexander explores the dialogue between the city's contemporary klezmer scene and the street-level creativity that has become a hallmark of Berlin's decidedly modern urbanity and cosmopolitanism. By tracing how klezmer music engages with the spaces and symbolic meanings of the city, Alexander sheds light on how this Eastern European Jewish folk music has become not just a product but also a producer of Berlin.

This engaging study of Berlin's dynamic Yiddish music scene brings together ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and urban geography to evoke the sounds, atmospheres, and performance spaces through which klezmer musicians have built a lively set of musical networks in the city. Transcending a restrictive framework that considers this music solely in the context of troubled German-Jewish history and notions of guilt and absence, Alexander shows how Berlin's current klezmer community—a diverse group of Jewish and non-Jewish performers—imaginatively blend the genre's traditional musical language with characteristically local tones to forge an adaptable and distinctively twenty-first-century version of klezmer. Ultimately, the music's vital presence in Berlin is powerful evidence that if traditional music is to remain audible amid the noise of the urban, it must become a meaningful part of that noise.

Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City

Phil Alexander

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on Translation, Orthography, Interviews and Recordings
Chapter 1: Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?
Chapter 2: The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks
Chapter 3: The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places
Chapter 4: Placing Berlin in the Music
Chapter 5: Sounding Jewish in Berlin
Chapter 6: Curating the Tradition: Dissemination, Learning, and Responsibility
Chapter 7: Performing Berlin: The Silence of the City (Postlude)
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Appendix 1: A Brief Overview of Klezmer Music
Appendix 2: Interview Information
Bibliography

Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City

Phil Alexander

Author Information

Phil Alexander, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Glasgow

Phil Alexander is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Reid School of Music at the University of Edinburgh, where he researches Scottish-Jewish musical encounters. Besides klezmer music and urban space, his published research also explores Edinburgh salsa, Holocaust memorial silence, synagogue cantors in early twentieth-century Glasgow, and accordions.

Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City

Phil Alexander

Reviews and Awards

"This is the first full-length study of a single klezmer and Yiddish music community: Berlin in the early to mid-2010s. Alexander beautifully shows how place is both involved in and impacted by the development of this local and at the same time transnational music scene. Drawing on urban studies and cultural studies alongside ethnomusicology, Alexander expands outwards from this snapshot of a particular moment in time, interrogating the nature of music revivals and exposing all of the resonances and contradictions involved, from ethnic, religious and national identities to affinities, continuities and ruptures, aesthetics, ideologies, politics, and memorial culture. It makes an important contribution to urban ethnomusicology, Jewish and ethnic studies, and to intercultural dialogue." - Joel E. Rubin, Associate Professor of Music, University of Virginia, ethnomusicologist, clarinetist, bandleader, recording artist

"With this rich, incisive account of klezmer's reinvention in contemporary Berlin, Phil Alexander makes a compelling contribution to the scholarship of contemporary urban musics, reaching beyond well-worn narratives of heritage, multiculturalism and appropriation to demonstrate how musical practices are produced by — and share in producing — the city around them." - Abigail Wood, Senior Lecturer, Department of Music, School of Arts, University of Haifa