Theological Stains

Theological Stains offers the first in-depth study of the development of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a bold and deeply researched account, author Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers. He argues that Israeli art music, caught in the tension between a bibliocentric territorial nationalism on the one hand andthe histories of deterritorialized Jewish diasporic cultures on the other, often features elements of both of these competing narratives. Even as composers critically engaged with the Zionist paradigm, they often reproduced its tropes and symbols, thereby creating aesthetic hybrids with 'theological stains.' Drawing on newly uncovered archives of composers' autobiographical writings and musical sketches, Shelleg closely examines the aesthetic strategies that different artists used to grapple with established nationalist representations. As he puts the history of Israeli art music in conversation with modern Hebrew literature, he weaves a rich tapestry of Israeli culture and the ways in which it engaged with key social and political developments throughout the second half of the twentieth century.In analyzing Israeli music and literature against the backdrop of conflicts over territory, nation, and ethnicity, Theological Stains provides a revelatory look at the complex relationship between art and politics in Israel.

This book breaks new ground and should be a model for viewing art music by composers connected to Jewish Music in America., With commanding erudition and analytical grace, Assaf Shelleg traces the dialectical re-emergence of the stains of exile and their crystallization in new, vibrant configurations in Hebrew literature, poetry, and especially art music., In this remarkable book, Assaf Shelleg examines the ways Israeli composers have negotiated the ever-changing ideologies of their state's identity. Drawing on a deep knowledge of historical contexts and repertories from the 1950s to the early 2000s, he addresses the irresolvable tensions — religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, Jewish and Arabic — that have troubled Israeli society since its founding; he demonstrates how these tensions inform compositional strategies even at a fundamental level. Theological Stains is a major contribution to studies of Israeli cultural history and a model for contextual music analysis.

Assaf Shelleg is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His award-winning first book, Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History (OUP, 2014) examines the emergence of modern Jewish art music in Central and Western Europe in the early twentieth century and its translocation to Palestine/Israel from the 1930s through the 1970s. It was translated into German in 2017 with MohrSiebeck.