Magazine

In the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, European composers regularly inflected their music with tunes rooted in Gypsy culture, whether heartfelt laments or exuberant dance tunes. The result was a warmly embraced hybrid that bridged cultures by enrichment rather than condescension. The sources of these Gypsy melodies varied from authentic to ersatz, with many folk-like pieces “improved on” by their incorporation into more urbane works. 

On June 2, 1988, twenty-six of the greatest pianists of the 20th century convened in New York’s Carnegie Hall to mount a concert unlike any other before it. The evening was organized in honor of Steinway Piano’s 135th anniversary, but the pianists who gathered around the honored instrument seemed to overshadow the very instrument that occasioned the event, the 500,000th piano built by the venerable firm.

Orientalia was the title of a slender début anthology of verse, published in 1913, by Marietta Shaginyan (1888–1982), a promising Symbolist poet of Armenian descent, born and educated in Moscow. Shaginyan dedicated Orientalia to the great Moscow Neo-Romantic composer, pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943), who was then about forty, married to Natalia Satina, with two daughters.

The question “What is Jewish music?” has provoked more than a few essays, books, and late-night, booze-soaked BS sessions among Jewish (and non-Jewish) musicians, composers, and people who write about Jewish music. An inquiry that should seem to be pretty straightforward turns out to be quite elusive, begging the question, do Irish musicians have such a hard time defining Irish music? What about Greeks? Persians? Chinese?