Outside the Synagogue: Traditional Songs and Nigunim of Eastern Yiddish Speakers
Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.
Instructor: Michael Lukin
Eastern European Jews created several distinctive musical repertoires that flourished from early modernity until the Holocaust. Among the most prominent were Yiddish folk songs, klezmer instrumental music, cantorial singing, paraliturgical songs, and, from the 18th century, Hasidic nigunim. Over this prolonged period, these genres developed interconnections, established their own ideals of beauty, and became the constant soundtrack of Jewish life. Marked by conservatism and internal inspirations, all traditional repertoires creatively adapted older Western European elements, absorbed before Ashkenazi Jews immigrated to Central and Eastern Europe (i.e., before the 16th–17th centuries), to their Slavic surroundings.
This course will focus primarily on two vocal repertoires that offer insight into this rich musical landscape: Yiddish folk songs and old Hasidic wordless nigunim. Through guided listening to rare archival recordings and discussions of the cultural contexts of songs and nigunim, we will explore their various genres, including ballads, folk paraphrases, cumulative songs, lullabies, lyric songs, and “cleaving nigunim,” as well as dance, march, and joy-nigunim. A close acquaintance with this creativity, often overlooked in the scholarship on the cultural history of Eastern Yiddish speakers, will deepen our understanding of their inner worlds, their attitudes toward the past and present, and their unspoken perceptions of beauty and emotional expression.
Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.
Michael Lukin is a research associate at the Jewish Music Research Centre specializing in the the traditional culture of Yiddish speakers from ethnomusicological, folkloristic, and historical perspectives. His recent publications, featured in Polin, The Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore, Musik Traditionen, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore, and Shofar, explore the music and poetics of Yiddish folk songs and their scholarship. Old Hasidic nigunim are the focus of his current digital-ethnomusicological project, NigunimBimBom.org. He has also investigated other aspects of Eastern-Ashkenazi music – as a Polonsky fellow in Oxford, a Mandel-Scholion postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University, and The Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania visiting fellow. Michael teaches courses on Jewish musical traditions and folklore, Hasidic musical thought, and Yiddish modern poetry at the Hebrew University and Bar-Ilan University, as well as the classical flute at the Hassadna Jerusalem Conservatory.
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