MUSIC 74 & 139: MUSIC IN ISRAEL

WEEKLY LISTENING ASSIGNMENTS

Week 10 This week is devoted to distinguished guests, and to perfecting our listening skills across musical cultures and political divides. On Tuesday, we will be hosting composer and jazz pianist, Doron Kima (accompanied by ney player, Hank Levin). On Thursday, we will be working with Prof. Benjamin Brinner, Chair of the Department of Music at UC Berkeley, whose book, Playing Across a Divide: IsraeliPalestinian Musical Encounters is part of our reading assignments. Their combined efforts will help us focusing on the issue of competence that musical encounters require from both performers and their audiences.
Doron Kima writes for orchestra, chamber ensembles, soloists, voice, electro-acoustic, and film scores, published by Capstone Records, Schott Music, Mercury Records, Bald Wins Records, and others. His personal background and professional experience have taken place on three continents. His work reflects ease with different cultures and traditions, and seeks to promote cultural understanding and cross-cultural communication and interaction. His concerto-type composition, Seeds of Hope, for nay (Arabic flute), oud (Arabic lute), and orchestra, is based on the Arabic maqam. His delicate and intricate chamber work, Song of Songs In the Garden of Delights for female voice, flute, harp, and two percussion players represents his twenty-first century point of view of an extremely old love story taken from the biblical Song of Songs. His jazz compositions range from lead sheets to big band charts and he appears on numerous jazz and commercial music recordings. He recorded/performed with Deborah Brown, Carl Allen, Mike Stern, Marcus Printup and Vincent Gardner among others. As a jazz pianist he has appeared at major festivals in the US, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal and Israel. These include the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland, and the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Israel. Benjamin Brinner is a professor at U.C. Berkeley, where he is currently chair of the Department of Music. His research has focused on issues of musical cognition, particularly memory, competence, and interaction among musicians. His books include Knowing Music, Making Music: Javanese Gamelan and the Theory of Competence and Interaction (Chicago, 1995) and his new work, Playing Across A Divide: Israeli-Palestinian Musical Encounters (Oxford, 2009), based on one and a half decades of research on the ethnic music scene in Israel.

Your listening assignments this week include samples of Arab maqam, a track from the 1997 CD, Pictures Through the Painted Window, Here He Comes (Muwashah) (see Oxford music here and here for more details on this type of Arab song) by the Israeli band, Bustan Avraham, and two versions of the classic Israeli Hebrew song, Erev shel shoshanim, by the Dudaim (1958), and by Aley hazayit (Jewish Jerusalemite Shoham Einav singing with a band led by Muslim Jerusalemite drummer Jamal Sa'id, with French Israeli bassist Jeane Claude Jones). The reading assignments include two chapters from Benjamin Brinners book (Playing Across A Divide), and a very different take on Arab-Palestinian music in Israel, by David A. McDonald (Indiana University). But, most importantly, focus on listening to the presenters, and on the musical performance component of Doron Kimas presentation. In your response, you will want to focus on describing your live listening experience, and on your take on the dynamics of the musical encounters discussed and performed by our guests.

Note: All required sound files and CD booklets available on bSpace.