Welcome to our research platform

For three years Tzlil Meudcan has been cultivating a research branch—a group of graduate and postgraduate musicologists interested in the history and cultural history of contemporary art music. Emerging from the Department of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and joined by young musicologists from Europe, this branch is part of the festival’s vision of building an infrastructure for practice and research, and all the more so given the current proliferation of compositional approaches in addition to the continuous attenuation of national aesthetics. It is these transitions that render the study of contemporary music mandatory, as they impact our very vocabulary and analytical toolbox. The musicology group at Tzlil Meudcan thus aims at deciphering and reconstructing composers’ networks alongside the mediators and patrimonies that animate them; at the same time, this group aspires to set up a discursive space for composers, performers, and musicologists.

Three musicological roundtables are scheduled to be held throughout the festival (at the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv); each will be moderated by Dr. Assaf Shelleg (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Prof. Christopher Fox (Brunel University), our guest musicologist and composer this year:

Music in Post-Epidemiological Circumstances (6.7.2021, 12:30 – 16:00) | The first session will discuss potential impacts of Covid19 on the contemporary music scene, as well as on the concert ritual: Who are likely to emerge as the new patrons of contemporary music post-Covid, and what would be the motivations of the political Powers That Be to subsidize such niches? Will orchestras continue doing more of the same, or will the tectonic shifts we have only began experiencing shape new curational practices? While this discussion exceeds what we currently know, there are ample precursors that point to future prospects.

Verbal Violence: Contemporary Music, Criteria, Minorities (7.7.2021, 12:30 – 16:00) | The second roundtable centers the language through which we talk and write about contemporary music, while focusing on the impact of reductive terminologies and other hierarchies that constitute the current discourses: How have such terminologies and socio-ethnic hierarchies impacted minorities throughout the last decades, and how do they shape the current discourse? Are we to exclude the very concept of minority from our vocabulary (and if so, what would be our alternatives)? Does this mean that the recalibration of our musicological vocabulary inevitable?

Roundtable: Composers—Musicologists—Audience (8.7.2021, 12:30 – 16:00) | Looking into the academic tracks that train undergraduate and graduate students towards the study and performance of contemporary music, this panel will debate the nature of such pedagogies in music academies and universities in Israel and abroad, while considering the presence (or absence) of historical, cultural and political orientation in such tracks. Expanding the scope of the dialogue, this concluding roundtable will include composers (mostly from Israel) who, together with the musicologists, would also take questions from the audience. 

-Assaf Shelleg