Vox Tablet

Musical Society

Studying the emergence of a Jewish national music in Imperial Russia

August 23, 2010
Joel Engel, at left, with phonograph and an unknown collaborator.(Collection of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences)
Joel Engel, at left, with phonograph and an unknown collaborator.(Collection of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences)

In the early 20th century, a group of Jewish composers including Joel Engel in Moscow and Mikhail Gnesin in St. Petersburg sought to find, record, and preserve the music of the shtetls in the Pale of Settlement. They then used that music as inspiration for their own high art compositions, hoping to create a Jewish national music that would be celebrated across Russia and Europe. In The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, tells the story of these musicians and their legacy. (Adam Kirsch’s reviewed The Most Musical Nation here.) Loeffler spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about what he discovered while writing this new book.

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Vox Tablet is Tablet Magazine’s weekly podcast, hosted by Sara Ivry and produced by Julie Subrin. You can listen to individual episodes here or subscribe on iTunes.

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