Artistic Control and Partnership

Abstract

, to watch a performance of Or Matias's new musical The Wave. Sitting among actors, creatives, and friends and family of the cast, I witnessed a dozen Indiana University musical theater students present the latest version of the powerful work, directed by Chloe Treat. To the undergraduate cast and musicians, the performance culminated a dream workshop year. They developed the work with the artists in two three-week stints at Indiana University before being flown into the epicenter of the musical theater world to help the artists transition the work to the next level. Their New York experience was rigorous, involving three days of twelve-hour rehearsals and the regular incorporation of new changes (including a new opening). In the end, however, their dedicated and nuanced performances showed a year's growth with their characters, as they dramatized with naturalness and depth the story of a Palo Alto teacher's social experiment with his class. I had seen and been moved by the show in the six previous performances at Indiana University, but watching the students enact their roles on a professional stage offered a poignant example of how successful artistic collaborations can mutually elevate a work, its creators, and its participants. The performance also represented the latest venture in a string of new artistic works supported by Indiana University's Borns Jewish Studies Program, made possible through a combination of personal connection, funding, and strategic campus partnerships. None of the student performers held an affiliation with the Program. Yet the experience enhanced a personal research project in ways that also resonated with the Jewish Studies Program's goals: the story has appeared in Holocaust education programs globally, as well as a number of psychology textbooks. 1 Supporting Matias and Treat's work, then, brought a new angle to my project, while also helping to bring a new musical into the world. In this essay, I approach the topic of Jewish music as a dynamic study of institutional initiatives-a perspective, I believe, as useful to understanding the field as the sound itself. Dig deeper into many musical works, and what at first appears as a freestanding flight of creativity becomes an entity that emerges from support by communal groups, organizations, and foundations-most of which carry benevolent if conservative ideological agendas. 2 A classic work of Jewish music such as Ernest Bloch's 1932 Sacred Service could not exist without a commission from San Francisco's Temple Emanu-El, and its cantor Reuben Rinder's program of engaging respected composers to elevate the American Reform movement's Union Prayer Book ritual. 3 Similarly, Galeet Dardashti has shown that the recent popularity of communal piyyut (Jewish devotional poem) singing came directly from a campaign to invigorate religious discourse among the country's secular Jews by the private American-Jewish philanthropy The Avi Chai Foundation. 4 Even what we acknowledge today as the academic field of Jewish music scholarship relied heavily ...