Compositional Solutions(in the double sense of the word)

Abstract

Extending from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, chapter 4 opens with what thus far in the book has remained subjected to officialdom—the Holocaust. The chapter explores several simultaneous aesthetic modes through which composers and authors confronted the Holocaust in Israel during the late twentieth century. Their formulations ranged from compliance with and duplication of statist views of the Holocaust as a counter-metaphor for political sovereignty to choices opting for exilic imports that garble national encoding and refuse redemption. Composers who distanced themselves from statist triumphalism affirmed the migration of contrafacta traveling political borders, national territorial tropes, and identitarian constructs. Qualities of this kind signaled a new stage in which Jewish exiles became a constituent feature in composers’ modernist agendas while the national soundboard was muted. A final discussion develops this thesis through Andre Hajdu and Betty Olivero’s “solutions” of ethnographic imports.