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  • New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene by Tamar Barzel
  • Amanda L. Scherbenske
NEW YORK NOISE: RADICAL JEWISH MUSIC AND THE DOWNTOWN SCENE
TAMAR BARZEL
BLOOMINGTON: INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015, ISBN: 978-0-253-01557-0, 328 PAGES, $28.00

Tamar Barzel's first book, New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene, focuses on the Radical Jewish Culture moment (circa 1992-98) in which overlapping networks of artists bridged two previously disconnected areas, creative voice and Jewish heritage. The import of their musical and written work, she avers, has implications for Jewish identity, fine arts, and literature as well as contemporary aesthetics. As an ethnomusicologist, Barzel bases her research on primary and secondary fieldwork periods (2000–2004; 2009–2010) and ongoing interactions with musicians, which together span roughly a decade.

In the early 1990s, John Zorn's coining of the term "Radical Jewish Music" crystalized the common concerns of many downtown artists who sought to compose "Jewishly identified" music that likewise rang true to their experimental and eclectic interests. Barzel situates the RJC artists within a tradition of Jewish intellectual renegades and the downtown scene's jazz and avant-garde jazz musicians, new classical composers, and underground rock and punk subcultures.

Drawing on Jonathan Freedman's work on Jewish American identity, which equally calibrates "Jewish" and "American," Barzel delves into the interactive, multifarious, and changing nature of her subject. She tempers this rather rose-tinted view of American pluralism, however, by putting it in conversation with a central concern for RJC participants, namely, whether it is possible, in the words of Daniel Boyarin, "[to] ethically construct a particular identity . . . without falling into ethnocentrism or racism of one kind or another" (quoted in Barzel 2015, 30). [End Page 109] Rightly, she recognizes the great import of a variety of African American musical practices that inspired and propelled RJC. In painstakingly highlighting the voices that supported the exploration of RJC ideals all the while making sure it was not ethnocentric, racist, or exclusive, Barzel covertly responds to George Lewis's cogently argued charge that Zorn and the downtown scene came putatively to include white artists, while simultaneously excluding black artists.1

The first two chapters offer some of the most compelling ideas in this very strong monograph. Barzel's application of ethnomusicological and anthropological concepts propels the arguments and brings ideas into focus, rather than unnecessarily bogging them down by theory for its own sake. In the first chapter, she inverts one of Philip Bohlman's theoretical perspectives on contemporary European Jewish music to consider RJC artists' exploration of the potential in getting Jewish music wrong. Marc Ribot's new iterations of American popular songs that he had heard at Jewish Reform weddings, for example, emphasize the limits of notions of Jewish music that attend only to music that ostensibly "sounds Jewish." Later, Barzel employs Steven Feld's interpretive moves—a concept that suggests that musical and social background influence perceptions of music, which, in turn, inform conceptions about how sound and social worlds interact—to argue for both performers and listeners as part of the creative act. Thus, Roy Nathanson's repetition of musical ideas outlining increasingly larger pitch intervals in the recording, "Tikkun," may be heard as congruous with practices of Jewish cantillation for listeners familiar with it. The second chapter advances one of the greatest contributions of the RJC moment, the dismantling of what Barzel refers to as "Jewish quietness," or "not referring to one's Jewishness in contexts that, while not overtly hostile, are nevertheless perceived as unwelcoming" (2015, 59). The social and historical factors undergirding it—she shows—entail assimilation, the Holocaust, jazz and rock's cultural exclusivity, and America's racial binary. The first Festival for Radical New Jewish Culture, curated by Zorn as part of the 1992 Munich Art Projekt, served as a watershed moment for artists, realizing for the first time that many of their colleagues shared a Jewish heritage and that this experience may furnish extraordinary artistic possibility. In its contestation of such quietness and foregrounding of Jewish culture, the RJC community came to impact not only the downtown scene, but also American Jewish culture...

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