Summary: In the early 20th century, a group of Jewish composers including Joel Engel in Moscow and Mikhail Gnesin in St. Petersburg sought to find, record, and preserve the music of the shtetls in the Pale of Settlement. They then used that music as inspiration for their own high art compositions, hoping to create a Jewish national music that would be celebrated across Russia and Europe. In The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, tells the story of these musicians and their legacy. (Adam Kirsch’s reviewed The Most Musical Nation here.) Loeffler spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about what he discovered while writing this new book. Your browser does not support the audio element.
