The talk addresses contemporary cultural transitions whose origins are set in the early years of the Zionist project, but whose current aesthetic proliferations in contemporary art music in Israel are no longer conditioned by territorial nationalism or dialectical returns to diasporic Jewish cultures. Aesthetic interests of the last two decades either abandon identitarian paradigms or attest to a disinterest in them (and subsequently in the territorial corollaries they had promoted). While the turn to Jewish histories and cultures in the 1970s and 80s entailed the eschewing of the national regime of representations and its arrays of stand-ins, it also accelerated aesthetic turns to contemporary compositional devices that were equally indifferent to territorialism and identitarian qualities. Concomitantly, admixtures of literal and post-literal practices have staged a dramatic shift in contemporary art music globally, bringing to the compositional fore an abundance of permutated imagery that have faltered representational apparatuses while contesting the postmodern penchant for marketable exoticisms. An imagery overproduction then saw the mutual ‘de-signifying’ of music markers while drawing on early modernist aesthetics. The semiotic novelties of such formulations as well as their admixture of the historical and ahistorical disclose crucial key variables of contemporaneity in Israel as well as the aftermath of Hebrew culture.
Discussing these transitions, the talk will focus on the works of two (female) composers: Betty Olivero and Chaya Czernowin.