About This Course
This course earns 1 elective credit
What is the role of music in framing sacred experience? How do the experiences of music and sound shape our sense of community, self, and history as Jews and as people living in our multiple worlds of daily life? What does a Jew sound like?
In this course, we will listen deeply to the history of Jewish sonic experience, open ourselves to the multiple forms of sound Jews have created in different times and places across the experience of diaspora, and consider how Jewish artists have used music to creatively respond to the aesthetic and spiritual needs of present-day Jewish communities.
In the first six classes, we will develop a vocabulary of keywords that will scaffold our analysis of Jewish music. In the second half of the course, we will look at specific Jewish diasporic musical cultures. Artists we will encounter along the way will be drawn from across Jewish history, including immigrant cantors in the United States, Sephardic women ballad singers, Turkish Jewish classical Ottoman performers, Ethiopian Jewish liturgical singers, Chassidic pop stars, “folk liturgists” in the U.S. of the past 50 years (such as Shlomo Carlebach and Debbie Friedman), Israeli “Mizrahi” music stars, and contemporary Jewish American musicians whose work defy categories.
We will look to each of these stylistic and historical areas for clues as to how Jews have interacted with their musical environments to construct meaningful communities and sacred experiences and how we today can thoughtfully call upon their achievements in our worship communities and our conceptions of Jewish history and identity.
Course Objectives
Through lectures, intensive listening, readings from scholars, and critical theory sources, this course will guide students to a new level of sophistication in their thinking about sound, community, and history. This syllabus provides students with links to all class lectures, a listening list of the musical examples touched upon, a list of suggested readings for each class, and assignments. Suggested readings are provided from key scholars of Jewish music and theoretical writings by scholars in related fields including literary criticism and cultural studies.
Students will receive one credit for completion of this course.
Assessments
Assessments for this course will include quizzes and a series of short videos the students will make themselves in response to prompts provided that relate to themes of lectures.
Each student will be required to create 7 short videos (5 to 10 minutes in length) geared towards the webcast format of informative and engaging self-presentation.
Videos should be posted to a devoted YouTube page or similar streaming video site and can be listed as unlisted if the student so desires. Videos are pass/fail.
Course Syllabus
Note: the video links to the courses as they are listed on the syllabus are not the links you will use. Please view the videos as they appear in your classroom.
Meet Your Instructor
Dr. Jeremiah Lockwood’s music career began with over a decade of apprenticeship to the legendary Piedmont Blues musician Carolina Slim, playing in the subways of New York City. He also trained under his grandfather Cantor Jacob Konigsberg and performed in his choir. Jeremiah’s band The Sway Machinery seeks inspiration from diverse realms of experience related to the cultural geography of New York City. The Sway Machinery has played around the world, including stints at legendary music festivals like Montreal Jazz, Roskilde, and perhaps most notably, Festival au Desert in Timbuktu, Mali. In addition to leading The Sway Machinery, Jeremiah toured for years as guitarist in the popular world-beat band Balkan Beat Box and has scored numerous film and video projects. Jeremiah was a recipient of the 2007-8 Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, was 2010 Artist-in-Residence for the Forward and was a 2011 Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra Composer Fellow. Jeremiah is currently working on a PhD in Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University. His solo guitar and voice record, entitled LOCKWOOD, was released in the Fall of 2014 on System Dialing Records. The new Sway Machinery LP, entitled Purity and Danger, was released in the spring of 2015 to critical acclaim.
Ratings and Reviews
Jeffrey SumberProfessor Lockwood does a great job bringing the Academy to the Seminary, lol. This is a very concise review of many angles of exploration regarding historical influences and the different flavors of Jewish culture through the centuries. Lots of new terms and ideas here!
Lisa Ann WhartonA sweeping look (and listen!) covering many centuries, continents and cultures of Jewish music. Jeremiah Lockwood provides academic and personal insights that convey a rich understanding and deep love of the material. Some of the samples and articles are not accessible, but even without them all, plenty to discover about the richness of our musical heritage and the contemporary Jewish music scene.
One person found this helpful.
Lockwood is an amazingly intelligent and thoughtful musicologist and exposed me to whole aspects of Judaism, Jewish culture and Jewish civilization that I'd barely focused on previously. Made me realize how much I want to break out of my ashkenazic frame of reference for my rabbinate. He is that rare human combination: unique genius and humility all wrapped in one !