Journeys in Jewish Choral Music

Erin Hall, Rondebosch

Russia to South Africa and Finland; Germany to Australia; Austria to Britain. These are just some of the journeys taken by Jewish musicians in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. Journeys of hope for a new start in a foreign land; journeys of fear for the future and the consequences of staying at home. From synagogue music to secular part-songs; concert anthems to vocal–instrumental chamber works; a generation of Jewish composers’ music was suppressed or assumed lost after the Holocaust for a variety of complex reasons, many of them (prejudice, discrimination, anti-Semitism) uncomfortably familiar to us today.