Israeli Art Music: A Reintroduction

Israeli art music reveals that the soundtrack of Israeli history is greater than the sum of its parts, which usually include popular and folk music genres. Surveying the development of Israeli art music from the late 1930s to the 1970s, this article attempts to transcend the periodic partitions that characterize the field's historiography, which has had little contact with recent historical and historiographic shifts in the study of Israeli history. Focusing on four synchronous vectors—namely, processes of autoexoticism, asymmetrical musical borrowing, the post-statehood dilution of national sentiment, and the post-67 reemergence of Jewish musical idioms—the article guides the reader through the dissolution of national art music and its post-statehood stratifications.