How do the materials of culture create memory? What practices are associated with the objects of day to day life? Can a pot tell you what to cook? Can a record teach someone to pray?
In this all day event, scholars of European Jewish culture and music will present artefacts of life that were created to sustain lifeways and cultural practices, and the afterlives of these objects as signifiers of deep cultural knowledge.
In the wake of the losses of the Holocaust, this heritage has been imagined in music, language, literature, and public cultural memory projects, and has also been built on and transformed through contemporary artistic projects. In this symposium and concert, we seek to uncover how Eastern European Jewish culture is remembered, and how it continues to serve as a foundation for cultural production today.
In the first part of the series, scholars of Eastern European Jewish Studies at Indiana University and beyond will convene a symposium on Jewish material culture and music in Eastern Europe, illuminating how the past has been imagined and remembered by both Jewish and non-Jewish communities. The second part will feature a concert of members of Khazones Underground, a contemporary cultural organization that presents new interpretations of Eastern European cantorial music through a musical revivalist approach to old cantorial records.
These are events are generously funded by the Sam and Joan New Institute Fund and the Dorit and Gerald Paul Fund for Jewish Culture & the Arts.
Symposium: Materials of Heritage in Jewish Eastern European Life
12:30 PM, Dogwood Room, Indiana Memorial Union
Register for the Symposium
Dov-Ber Kerler - "From the New to the Old World and Vice Versa: Contrafacts, Adaptation and Radical Reworking"
Judith Berkson - "Patterns of Improvisation in Live Cantorial Recordings, 1950-1980"
Jeremiah Lockwood - "Plastinkes and idisher rekords: Towards a History of Jewish Sacred Pop Music as Material Culture"
Halina Goldberg - "Material, Culture, Memory, and the Making of a Museum and Digital Project on Jewish Lodz"
Nicolette van den Bogerd - "Composing Jewish Musical Material Culture After the Holocaust"
Jennifer McComas - "Transformations of Material and Memory in Ruth Weiberg's Shtetl Portfolio"
Reception
3:30 PM, Eskenazi Museum of Art
Continue the Memory Transformed program at the Eskenazi Museum of Art with an afternoon reception bringing together symposium participants, performers, students, faculty, and members of the community.
The reception takes place in conjunction with two guided museum tours offered at 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. The tours are separately ticketed through free advance registration because space is limited.
Guests are welcome to attend the reception whether or not they participate in a guided tour.
Free and open to the public.
Guided Tours of Eskenazi Museum of Art
4:00 PM, Tour 1
Register for Tour 1
5:00 PM, Tour 2
Register for Tour 2
Among other items in the Eskenazi Museum of Art permanent collection, guests will view a Holocaust memorial maquette by Luisie Kaish and Ruth Weisberg's print portfolio. Tours led by Dr. Jennifer McComas, Curator of European and American Art.
Concert - Voices from the Khazones Underground: feat. The Sway Machinery and The Immortal Khazntes
7:00 PM, Auer Hall
Register for the concert
About The Sway Machinery
The Dream Past is the latest project of the “unclassifiable and uplifting” (The New Yorker) Brooklyn rock band, The Sway Machinery; it is the band’s first record to be released in a decade. The Dream Past extends the band’s long running project of cantorial revival—excavating the otherworldly potentials of Jewish sacred music and lost melodies to instigate a party, break boundaries between communities, and touch the past. Like its debut album, Hidden Melodies Revealed, which also drew upon High Holidays liturgy, The Dream Past offers an expansive vision of what can be achieved through commitment to ancestor voices and reciprocity with the dead. This new work turns to a lost and now rediscovered archive of bootleg recordings of live prayer leading as the source material for its ecstatic transformation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImBigsj58Bc
Jeremiah Lockwood
Yuli Ya'el Be'eri
Stuart Bogie
John Bollinger
Jordan McLean
About The Immortal Khazntes
Khaznte is the Yiddish language term that was used in the early 20th century to describe Jewish women who sang khazones. The Immortal Khazntes features four artists working on personal projects of heritage reclamation: Judith Berkson, an unclassifiable singer, cantor, composer and scholar whose work tears down many barriers between worlds of sound, accompanied on this record by new music icons Kronos Quartet; Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, a musician and activist who is currently working on a research and performance project dedicated to the groundbreaking career of Madame Goldie Steiner, the only known African American woman performer of khazones in the cantorial golden age period; internet celebrity Riki Rose, a singer who has moved beyond her Satmar Hasidic community to frame a liberatory career as an artist and creative persona; and Rachel Weston, a British cantor and Yiddishist who applies her deep knowledge of Yiddish vocal music to her approach to khazones, accompanied by rising stars in the traditional music world Fran & Flora.
Judith Berkson
Riki Rose
Rachel Weston
Shahanna McKinney-Baldon
Francesca Ter-Berg
Flora Curzon
The College of Arts