Jewish Music & Exile

Music has always travelled with people. It crosses borders, survives migration, preserves memory and continually acquires new meanings in changing cultural landscapes. Much of my research has been shaped by this simple but far-reaching observation. Whether studying Jewish musical life in Tudor England, the emergence of Jewish national music in Eastern Europe, composers who found refuge in Britain after 1933, or the development of music in Israel, I am interested in the relationship between music, identity and historical experience.

Far from being a single field, Jewish music embraces many interconnected histories. It includes synagogue traditions, art music, popular music, questions of religious practice and cultural identity, and the ways in which Jewish composers have contributed both to their own communities and to the wider musical cultures in which they have lived. One of the pleasures of working in this area is discovering unexpected connections between periods, countries and traditions that are often studied separately.

One strand of my research explores the history of Jewish music in Britain. This has become an increasingly important project, arising from many years of teaching, writing and archival research. While Jewish musical life in Britain is often assumed to begin with nineteenth-century immigration, its roots extend much further back. My work traces these traditions as far as the Tudor period, following the changing place of Jewish musicians and Jewish musical culture from the reign of Henry VIII to the present day. This long historical perspective has convinced me that the story is both richer and more continuous than is generally recognised, and it forms the basis of a book now in preparation.

Running alongside this historical work is a long-standing interest in the experience of exile. The twentieth century transformed European musical culture through the displacement of composers forced to leave their homes by persecution, dictatorship and war. Britain became an important place of refuge for many of these musicians, who brought with them not only remarkable creative achievements but also complex questions of identity, memory and belonging. Understanding how exile shaped their music has become one of the central concerns of my research.

I have never assumed that every work written by an émigré composer should automatically be understood through the lens of exile. Like any composer, those who rebuilt their lives in new countries wrote music for many different occasions and purposes. What interests me particularly are those works in which displacement itself becomes an audible presence: music that carries memories of places left behind while simultaneously responding to entirely new cultural environments. Listening for those traces of memory, transformation and renewal has become one of the most rewarding aspects of my work.

These ideas informed my co-edited volume Music and Exile: From 1933 to the Present Day, published in the Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies. My own contribution examined Franz Reizenstein's Anna Kraus as a Holocaust opera, while related research has explored the remarkable correspondence between Paul Ben-Haim (formerly Paul Frankenburger) and the Crusius family in Munich. Such letters reveal that exile is not only a political or geographical condition but also a profoundly human one, preserving friendships, memories and artistic identities across continents and decades.

A related area of interest concerns Israeli music and the emergence of new musical cultures following migration. My edited volume Classical and Popular Music in Israel grew from many years of involvement with the Jewish Music Institute and the Forum for Israeli Music at SOAS, where I served as Director of Research and helped organise the international conference Art Musics of Israel. Earlier, a JMI Millennium Award supported my project Piano Music by Composers in Israel, bringing together performance and scholarship in exploring a repertoire that deserves much wider recognition.

My work also extends to the symbolic and musical significance of the shofar. This remarkable instrument occupies a unique place within Jewish history, standing at the intersection of ritual, memory and musical expression. My research follows the shofar from its ancient liturgical role through its appearance in twentieth- and twenty-first-century concert music, exploring the ways in which composers have continually reimagined its distinctive voice. This has been not only an academic interest but also a creative one. My own Concertino for Shofars and Ensemble, first performed at London's Purcell Room, reflects the same dialogue between historical tradition and contemporary musical imagination that informs my research.

More recently my attention has turned increasingly towards the composer Joel Engel and the intellectual origins of modern Jewish national music. Engel occupies a pivotal position within the emergence of Jewish art music in the early twentieth century, and my current work seeks to understand his contribution within a wider international network of musicians, scholars and collectors. This research naturally complements my continuing work on Jewish musical institutions, exile studies and British Jewish musical history.

Although these projects range widely across periods and countries, they are united by a common set of questions. How does music preserve cultural memory? How are identities reshaped through migration? What remains constant, and what changes, when musical traditions move across borders? These questions continue to resonate not only within Jewish history but within the wider study of music and culture.

My current research brings these various strands together through books, articles, conference papers and editorial projects. Increasingly I have come to see Jewish music not as a specialised field existing apart from mainstream music history, but as an essential lens through which broader questions of identity, creativity, exile and cultural exchange can be understood. It is precisely because Jewish musical history crosses so many geographical, historical and artistic boundaries that it continues to offer such rich opportunities for discovery.

For me, this work is ultimately about people as much as music. Behind every score lies a human story of continuity, adaptation and imagination. Listening carefully to those stories allows us not only to understand Jewish musical culture more deeply, but also to appreciate the extraordinary capacity of music itself to carry memory across generations and across the changing landscapes of history.