ABSTRACT
In 1980, when I embarked on studying the music culture of modern Israel during the historical period of immigration and nation-building during the 20th century, I did not know I had begun an ethnomusicological study of Western art music. During my graduate work in ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois I had continued to study the piano, and moving between Kenneth Drake's piano studio, where I played Schubert, and Bruno Nettl's office, where I listened intently to the radif, was entirely unremarkable. For my dissertation I turned to a music that played a significant role in the representation of what was still referred to simply as ethnicity, initially that of a religious minority and a modern ethnic community that had formed in Israel after immigration from Central Europe. Soon thereafter, I extended my ethnographic work historically to consider an oppressed racial minority that was forced to become refugees during an era of fascism and holocaust.
