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Popular Music and National Culture
in Motti Regev & Edwin Serouss
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A unique Israeli
national culture - indeed, the very nature of "Israeliness"
- remains a matter of debate, a struggle to blend vying memories and
backgrounds, ideologies and wills. Identifying popular music as an important
site in the wider cultural endeavor, this book focuses on the three major
popular music cultures that are proving instrumental in attempts to invent Israeliness: the invented folk song repertoire known as Shirei Eretz Yizrael; the contemporary, global-cosmopolitan
Israeli rock; and the ethnic-oriental musiqa
mizrahit. The result is the first comprehensive
study of popular music in Motti Regev,
a sociologist, and Edwin Seroussi, an
ethnomusicologist, approach their subject from alternative perspectives,
producing a truly interdisciplinary, sociocultural
account of music as a feature and a force in the shaping of Israeliness. A major ethnographic undertaking, describing
and analyzing the particular history, characteristics, and practice of each
music culture. Popular Music and National Culture in Israel maps not
only the complex field of Israeli popular music, but also Israeli culture in
general. The authors argue that despite disagreements about what is typically
Israeli music - or whether in fact such music exists - a deep commitment to
the idea of inventing a unique musical idiom underlies most music practice in
the country. By illuminating the specific nature and directions of these
cultural and social processes in Motti Regev is Senior Lecturer in
the Department of Sociology at the Open University of Israel. He is the
author of Rock: Music and Culture (1995) and Oud
and Guitar: The Musical Culture of the Arabs in Edwin Seroussi is the Emanuel Alexander Professor of
Musicology and Director of the Jewish Music Research Center at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. |
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