a cura di Luca Lévi Sala, Bologna, Ut Orpheus Edizioni, 2020 (Ad Parnassum Studies, 12), pp. 320.
The present book aims to describe 19th-century Jewish musical production in light of major social and historical events: a revolutionary process for the Jewish world resulting from its inclusion in European political and cultural secularization. The ferment that such assimilation brought resulted in the fragmentation of the Jewish religious identity into distinct liturgical currents. How much the 19th-century modernization of the Jewish world affect the Jewish identity of composers and their music, encompassing the following components: conversion, liturgy, synagogal chant and cantillation, musical form, opera, textuality, entrepreneurship and individuality? How many of these structural components were direct or corollary to both musical composition, and the concept of Jewishness?
Luca Lévi Sala PhD is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Manhattan College (NYC) and Visiting Scholar at New York University. He was Visiting Teaching Professor at Jagiellonian University in Cracow (2021) and at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2020-2021), former Professeur associé at Université de Montréal (2017-2020), Visiting Researcher at New York University (2017) and Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University (2015-2016). He has published a range of articles and chapters, reviews and reports (serving as peer-reviewer as well) in various international books and refereed journals, including Early Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Notes, Revue de musicologie, Studi musicali, Journal of Jewish Identities, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, Ad Parnassum Journal, Studia Chopinowskie, Musica Jagellonica, Eighteenth-Century Music, Analecta Musicologica, Oxford Bibliographies Online, MGG, Grove Music Online. His book Music and Politics in the Italian Fascist State in the 1930s: The View from the Press is committed to be published with Boydell & Brewer (Suffolk, UK).