Musikalische Grenzgänge

In this book, Assaf Shelleg explores the history of Israeli art music and its ongoing discourse with modern Jewish art music. He introduces the reader to various aesthetic dilemmas involved in the emergence of this music, ranging from auto-exoticism through the hues of self-hatred to the disarticulation of Jewish musical markers. He then considers part of the music's translocation to Mandatory Palestine, studying its brisk discourse with Hebrew culture, and how composers grappled with modern and Zionist images of the self. Unlike previous efforts in the field, Shelleg unearths the mechanism of what he calls »Zionist musical onomatopoeias«, but, more importantly, their dilution by the non-western Arab-Jewish oral musical traditions.
The English original edition of this book, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2014, won the 2015 Engle Prize for the Study of Hebrew Music, and the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award.