What does our department offer?
The department of musicology offers a variety of courses in two tracks: the history of Western art music and ethnomusicology; both include theoretical and cultural historical aspects. The curriculum as a whole addresses questions concerning the evolutionary vs revolutionary stylistic shifts in music history; it asks what are the syntactic principles animating the "language of music," and weather music could in fact be considered a language. From a theoretical point of view, we discuss how do notes and durations join one another and to what effect; from a cognitive perspective we ask how do humans perceive music and why does it manage to excite them (and us); and from a broader historical outlook we inquire if and how music can reflect emotional states or socio-political realities. And there are subsequent other topics: Do inherently different musical cultures share universal traits? Is Jewish or Israeli music unique, or is it more appropriate to talk about music in Jewish or Israeli culture and society? What is the nature of relationship between popular music, folk music, and art music? How do gender and music impact one another?
Among the current faculty members are leading scholars in the fields of European art music (from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century), psycho-acoustics and cognition, Jewish music(s), popular and folk music(s), musicological historiography, aesthetics, semiotics, and more.
About the Department
Founded in 1965 by Professor Alexander Ringer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, the Musicology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was the first department of its kind in Israel. Within a decade of its existence it boasted distinguish faculty members such as Israel Adler, Bathja Bayer, Josef Tal, Dalia Cohen, Ruth Katz (both Cohen and Katz were the 2012 recipients of the Israel Prize in music), Amnon Shiloah, Jehoash Hirshberg, Roger Kamien and Don Harrán. Then as in nowadays the Department seeks to advance interdisciplinary research of music as a multifaceted phenomenon whose manifestations proliferate across social, political, and ethnic borders. Classes in the Musicology Department focus on two major fields: historical musicology and ethnomusicology.
The department of musicology also maintains a strong alliance with the Jewish Music Research Center, an academic institution fully dedicated to the documentation, research and publication of scholarly materials about Jewish music.
Music ensembles and Concerts
Several departmental ensembles expose students, faculty, and other members of the academic community to various musical repertories, both as participants and as audiences: all first-year students, for example, take part either in the University Orchestra or in University Choir. The Department occasionally organizes performance workshops and hopes to relaunch the year-round workshop devoted to the study and performance of Gamelan music. Moreover, our Monday Concert Series has been running for more than four decades, featuring students, professors, and some of the leading musicians in the country—(almost) every Monday at 13:00 (free admittance; see the season at a glance here)