Heterophonies: Musical Textures and Historiographies in Israeli Art Music

Abstract

This article situates early Israeli art music against historiographical canonizations of exoticist paradigms and euphonic formulations that complemented the Zionist allegory. Using the textural notion of heterophony, namely, the simultaneous unfolding of variants of a given melodic line, the author traces the heterophony of compositional attitudes that upended nationalist paradigms. In the process, two types of linearity resulted: the linearity of a nationalist historiography that duplicated Zionist redemptive narratives and rhetorical negations of diasporic Jewish cultures; and linear musical syntaxes that sought to break away from Eurocentric formulations that confirmed and preserved Zionism’s socioethnic hierarchy. Gradually, what began as experiments in monophonies developed into melodic planes that incorporated non-Western Jewish musical imports and in turn rendered exoticization inoperative. Combining cultural-historical and historiographical accounts, the author suggests that composers’ turn to the properties of non-Western Jewish musical traditions gave rise to an undisciplined and non-differential network of aesthetic approaches (ranging from compositional narratives caught in the nationalist discourse to aesthetic precursors anticipating the muting of the national soundboard) that were absorbed in elastic historiographical textures capable of containing such simultaneities.