Golden times

Villa Seligmann cordially invites you to the concert “Golden Times” followed by a salon talk.

Part I: Concert (6 pm)

Golden Age: The Renewal of Cantorial Music in Hasidic Brooklyn

Yanky Lemmer, Shimmy Miller, Yoel Kohn – cantors
Jeremiah Lockwood – direction and accompaniment

String quartet:
Moritz Ter-Nedden (violin)
Pauline Herold (violin)
Colin Jahns (viola)
Linda Heiberga (Cello)

In today’s Brooklyn, there’s a remarkable music revival bubbling away in secret from the eyes of most music fans. It takes place in communities in Williamsburg and Borough Park, and the main performers are young Hasidic singers. In the separatist Orthodox community, the older forms of Jewish music have been largely supplanted by pop music that sounds a lot like what you hear on the radio. The texts that are sung to, however, are Yiddish or Hebrew texts with religious content, mostly also Jewish prayer texts. A small but lively group of young singers have made the style of cantorial music from before the Second World War their preferred art form, performing pieces recorded almost a century ago. While some of these singers grew up in families with older cantors from whom they could learn, other artists only discovered this music through old records. In an environment that may seem to outsiders like a discouragement to self-expression, these artists delve into the past to find their own expressive style. The concert thus also provides a unique insight into the musicality of the Orthodox Hasidic community in Brooklyn.

In a unique concert, the stars of the cantorial revival Yanky Lemmer, Shimmy Miller and Yoel Kohn perform classical cantorial recitatives. They will be accompanied by producer and arranger Jeremiah Lockwood and a string quartet.

The concert is also our program prelude to the Purimfestwhich begins on the evening of March 23.

Part II: Salon discussion (approx. 7.15 p.m.)

“The world of Hasidic music” – a conversation with the author Jeremiah Lockwood and the author Jessica Roda

Following the concert, Jeremiah Lockwood and Jessica Roda will entertain on the occasion of the publication of their new books: Golden Ages: Hassidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era and For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age. Through ethnography and media analysis, Lockwood and Roda offer unique insights into the vibrant male and female art world of Hasidic and Litvish Jews in North America today. They lead us to rethink the power of art in order to understand agency, privacy and publicity in religious contexts. In particular, the idea of religious Jewish women, who are often portrayed in the public eye as oppressed, withdrawn and lacking creativity and freedom of choice, is turned on its head.

The moderated discussion will be held in English. Visitors are cordially invited to contact the author directly with questions and suggestions (in German).

Jeremiah Lockwood(https://jeremiahlockwood.com) is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. He is currently a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Both his musical performances and his scholarly work focus on Jewish liturgical music and Yiddish expressive culture of the early 20th century and the reverberations of this cultural moment in today’s communities. Lockwood’s research focuses on the work of cantors as agents of social, intellectual and aesthetic change in times of crisis and cultural transformation. Jeremiah Lockwood received his doctorate from Stanford University in 2021. In 2022/2023, he was a fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where he researched the phenomenon of female cantors in the gramophone era. There he also composed a new piece of music that responds to this fertile moment in Jewish music history. Jeremiah has recorded more than a dozen albums with his band The Sway Machinery and other projects over the course of his decade-long music career.

Jessica Roda (https://www.jessicaroda.com) is Assistant Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist trained in Europe and North America. Her research interests include music, religion, cultural heritage, gender and media. For the research for her new book For Women and Girls Only. Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age (New York University Press, 2024), she was honored with the Cashmere Award of the AJS Women’s Caucus (2021) and the Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Award (2021). Since fall 2023, she has been a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania). There she is working on her new project on music, healing and spirituality in ultra-orthodox Jewish circles. Roda has been a visiting scholar at various universities in North and South America as well as in Europe. She is president-elect of the Canadian Association for Traditional Music and co-chair of the Special Interest Group for Jewish Music of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

The event is organized in cooperation with the European Center for Jewish Music (HMTMH).

Please note that we will be taking photos and videos during this event. The image material will be published on our website and/or social media channels and used for press work. By participating, visitors to this event agree to this.