Tuesday, March 4, 2014. 12:00 PM
This study of Bene Israel (Marathi Jewish) devotional music from the 19th to the 21st centuries looks at how Bene Israel and other groups communicate with each other. It also suggests new ways to think about cultural translation in musical contexts. The first part of the presentation focuses on Bene Israel kirtans (devotional songs with stories) that were performed in the years after the first Jewish kirtan group was formed in 1880. It tries to figure out how and why a Hindu temple genre was used for Jewish purposes. It wasn’t easy to make a Hindu song sound like a Jewish song because of the social and political climate in late 1800s India. This part of the presentation talks about how to change the gender of kirtan and how to sing it.
