Broken Hebrewist Vessels

Abstract

Whereas the music Mordecai Seter wrote in 1966 embodies a clash between his unsignified semiotic procedures and the national redemptive trajectories that animated them, Andre Hajdu’s music in 1970 knowingly staged unwanted sonic adjacencies of the Jewish Eastern European soundscape alongside Christian music from late medieval Europe. Both composers sought de-signification—either by eschewing ethnographic imports in the form of folk or liturgical music (Seter), or through violent deconstructions of seemingly opposing musical markers of Jews and Christians (Hajdu). The works of both therefore disclose meaningful disharmonie: both manifest the disabling of Zionist tropes and the concomitant reclaiming of the ethnic specificity of diasporic Ashkenazi culture. This chapter also reads the late music of Seter and Ben-Haim against the background of their notebooks and diaries, in addition to two seminal literary works—Past Continuous (1977) by Yaakov Shabtai and Unto Death (1969) by Amos Oz—that record admixtures of diasporic Jewish subcultures and the fallouts of a post-ideological age.