Art Music in arab Palestine and jewish Israel

Since of 1930s saw an influx of Jewish composers to British Colonial Mandatory Palestine Territory, later Palestine/Trans-Jordan and Palestine/Israel, among them musicians of stature in Europe. These composers included Paul Ben-Haim, Erich Walter Sternberg, Marc Lavri, Oeden Partos, and Alexander Boskovitch. These composers were all concerned with forging a new Jewish identity in music, an identity which would suit the new, emerging identity of Israel. While the response of each of these composers to this challenge was intensely personal, there was one distinct trend to which many of them adhered: many of these and other composers sought to distance themselves from the musical style of the Klezmer, of eastern European Jewry, (this is notably also true of the chosen way Israel pronounces Hebrew, which specifically left out all European Jewish shibboleths in Hebrew accent) which they viewed as weak and unsuitable for the new national ethos. Many of the stylistic features of Klezmer and Yiddish were abhorrent to them. "Its character is depressing and sentimental", wrote music critic and composer Menashe Ravina in 1943. "The healthy desire to free ourselves of this sentimentalism causes many to avoid this...".


Perhaps the most radical in his search for a new (more Sefaradi) Jewish identity was Alexander Boskovitch. His Semitic Suite for piano, written in 1945, draws much from Arabic music: it is nonharmonic, almost homophonic. He uses repeated notes to imitate the sound of a Kanun.


From these early experiments has grown a large corpus of original Israeli art music, much of it specifically seeking a return to their roots in Jewish musical tradition. Notable among modern Israeli composers are


Betty Olivera, composer in residence at Bar Ilan University. Olivera takes traditional Jewish melodies – both Ashkenazic and Sephardic – and sets them in complex, profoundly dissonant contexts. The result, surprisingly, is not something sounding ultramodern, but rather a natural extension of the folk traditions she draws on. Her work Serafim for soprano, clarinet, violin, cello and piano is a good example of this.
Tsippi Fleischer, who has composed vocal works that merge contemporary Western compositional techniques with the modal, quartertone scales of Arabic music.
Mark Kopytman, whose compositions draw heavily on both Eastern European Klezmer and Oriental Jewish sources.
Yitzhak Yedid, Israeli composer, strives to merge classical genres with free modern improvisation and Eastern and Jewish music styles, breaking out of defined frameworks to produce an original sound.


Non-Jewish Contributors to Jewish Music
Art Music in arab Palestine and jewish Israel
The Jewish National Revival in Art Music