Music in Israel at Sixty: Processes and Experiences

Abstract

Drawing a panoramic assessment of a field of culture that resists clear categorizations and whose readings offer multiple and utterly contrasting options such as Israeli music is a challenge entailing high intellectual risks.  For no matter which way your interpretations lean you will always be suspected of aligning with one ideological agenda or another.  Untangling the music, and for that matter any field of modern Israeli culture, is a task bound to oversimplification unless one abandons all aspirations to interpret the whole and just focuses on the more humble mission of selecting a few decisive moments which illuminate trends and processes within that whole.  Modest perhaps as an interpretative strategy, by concentrating on discrete time, spatial and discursive units (a concert, a band, an album, an obituary, a music store, an academic conference, etc) this paper attempts to draw some meaningful insights as sixty years of music-making in Israel are marked.