The Dilution of National Onomatopoeias in Post-Statehood Israeli Art Music: Precursors, Contiguities, Shifts

Abstract

Israeli art music penned from the late 1930s to the early 1960s unfolds early serial practices in Mandatory (British) Palestine that had come to the fore during the early post-statehood years, when growing disillusionment with romanticist nationalism loomed large. Abandoning peripheral native masks, composers responded to the post-statehood shift by either adapting the linear properties of non-Western Jewish music, which they aligned with local readings of serial devices, or through the destabilization of folk-like dances and exotic musical markers. Shifts in Israeli poetry parallel the emerging attitudes of the first cohort of native Israeli composers and the gradual fading of the nation’s unisonality from their music.