Imploding signifiers: Exilic jewish cultures in art music in Israel, 1966–1970

Whereas the music Mordecai Seter wrote in 1966 marks a clash between his un-signified 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 earmarks of Jews and Christians (Hajdu). Both works therefore disclose meaningful disharmonies. They manifest the disabling of Zionist tropes (while still rendering them present) and the concomitant reclaiming of the ethnic specificity of diasporic Ashkenazi culture.