Visualizing the Archive: A Preliminary Framework for Analyzing the Discography of Jewish Music in America

Since the advent of sound recording and mechanical reproduction technology in late 1800s, Jewish music has been commercially recorded. Because music has been a vital part of the American Jewish experience, these recordings are important primary historical documents chronicling the history and development of Jewish life and culture in the U.S. Collectively, they reveal a great deal about how music has mediated the American Jewish experience, from changing religious practices and modes of cultural identity to various responses to the forces of assimilation and Americanization. The world of American Jewish music experienced sweeping changes over the course of the twentieth century. While sacred Jewish music has embraced styles ranging from folk and popular to classical and new-age, Jewish expression in secular music ranges from klezmer and folk song to art music, jazz, and musical theater. Despite this abundance of activity, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of the tens of thousands of Jewish music recordings that exist in archives and libraries across the U.S. A collaborative research project between UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience and the Milken Archive of Jewish Music aims to fill a significant gap in the research by (1) creating a single, comprehensive database of recorded Jewish music in American archives; and (2) developing a systematic framework for analyzing them. Based on a preliminary analysis of the Milken Archive of Jewish Music: the American Experience, the analytical framework includes forty-one different criteria across eight distinct categories, and aims to profile a recording based on parameters of genre, style, and language, as well as its various groundings in the Jewish experience. This presentation will share results from current analyses as well as some of the challenges the research team has faced working with data from multiple sources.