University of Chicago
Bio: Phil Bohlman’s teaching and research draw upon diverse methods and perspectives in music scholarship to forge an ethnomusicology built upon foundations in ethnography, history, and performance. He is particularly interested in exploring the interstices between music and religion, music, race, and colonial encounter, and music and nationalism. The study of Jewish music in modernity has provided a primary focus for his research for four decades, and since 1998 has provided the context for his activities as a performer, both as the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society (a Jewish cabaret and ensemble-in-residence at the Humanities Division), and in stage performances with Christine Wilkie Bohlman (the College) of works for piano and dramatic speaker created during the Holocaust. With the New Budapest Orpheum Society, Phil has released four CDs, most recently As Dreams Fall Apart: The Golden Age of Jewish Stage and Film Music, 1925–1955 (Cedille Records 2014). His work in historical performance has been recognized with the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society and the Donald Tovey Prize from Oxford University. Since 2008, Phil has been conducting research India, especially in Kolkata, Varanasi, and rural West Bengal. His research on the Eurovision Song Contest is ongoing.
Course Information: THE CABARETESQUE IN JEWISH MUSIC
Word and song together join in this evening devoted to the cabaretesque in Jewish music. The cabaretesque, a term created for the evening, is a performative moment in which cultural, religious, and aesthetic differences of modern Judaism converge upon a stage, both metaphorical and physical, mediated by music to reframe the narratives of the everyday and of history
Publications
Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee. Bloomsbury, 2021.
World Music: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Wie sängen wir Seinen Gesang auf dem Boden der Fremde! Jüdische Musik des Aschkenas zwischen Tradition und Moderne. LIT Verlag, 2019.
Sounding Cities: Auditory Transformations in Berlin, Chicago, and Kolkata (coedited with Sebastian Klotz and Lars-Christian Koch). LIT Verlag, 2018.
Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism (with J. G. Herder). University of California Press, 2017.
Jazz Worlds / World Jazz (coedited with Goffredo Plastino). University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual (coedited with Jeffers Engelhardt). Oxford University Press, 2016.
This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (coedited with Victoria Lindsay Levine). Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
As Dreams Fall Apart: The Golden Age of Jewish Stage and Film Music, 1925–1955 (double-CD with the New Budapest Orpheum Society). Cedille Records, 2014.
The Cambridge History of World Music (ed. by Philip V. Bohlman). Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Revival and Reconciliation: Sacred Music in the Making of European Modernity. Scarecrow Press, 2013.
Hanns Eisler – In der Musik ist es anders (with Andrea F. Bohlman). Hentrich & Hentrich, 2012.
Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity (coedited with Nada Petković). Scarecrow, 2012.