Let Jasmine Rain Down by Kay Kaufman Shelemay

Let Jasmine Rain Down by Kay Kaufman Shelemay

When Jews left Aleppo, Syria, in the early-20th century and established communities abroad, they carried with them a repertory of songs (pizmonim) with sacred Hebrew texts set to melodies borrrowed from the popular Middle Eastern Arab musical tradition. This text tells the story of the "pizmonim" as they have continued to be composed, performed and transformed through the present day; it is thus an ethnography of an important Judeo-Arabic musical tradition that contributes to studies of the link between collective memory and popular culture. Kay Kaufman Shelemay views the intersection of music, individual remembrances and collective memory through the "pizmonim". Reconstructing a century of "pizmonim" history in America based on research in New York, Mexico and Israel, she explains how verbal and musical memories are embedded in individual songs and how these songs perform both what has been remembered and what otherwise would have been forgotten. In confronting issues of identity and meaning in a postmodern world, Shelemay moves ethnomusicology in to the domain of memory studies.

Shelemay, Kay Kaufman: - Kay Kaufman Shelemay (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and has taught at Columbia, NYU, and Wesleyan. A Fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, she is a Past President of the Society for Ethnomusicology. She has received fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Shelemay's research interests include musical ethnography, music and memory, and Ethiopian music and musicians in their North American diaspora. She is the author of nine books and editions, including Music, Ritual, and Falasha History, which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the Prize of the International Musicological Society. An outstanding teacher, Shelemay received an Award for Distinguished Teaching from the Columbia University School of General Studies in 1982, the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize at Harvard in 2006, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award at Harvard. In 2014, Shelemay was elected an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780226752129
ISBN 10	0226752127
Title	Let Jasmine Rain Down
Author	Kay Kaufman Shelemay
Series	Chicago Studies In Ethnomusicology Cse
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University Of Chicago Press
Year published	1998-12-01
Number of pages	310
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.