Assaf Shelleg

Assaf Shelleg (Hebrew: אסף שלג) is an Israeli-American musicologist and pianist, a senior lecturer of musicology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was previously the Schusterman Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology and Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia (2011–2014), and had taught prior to that as the visiting Efroymson Scholar in the Jewish, Islamic & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department at Washington University in St. Louis (2009–2011). Shelleg specializes in art music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, modern and contemporary Jewish Art Music, Oral Jewish musical traditions, historical musicology, post-tonal theories, actor-network theory, and contemporaneity, often whilt focusing on the cultural networks in which art music was written by or about Jews, in Europe, North America, British Palestine, and Israel. Between 2021 and 2023 Shelleg has served as the director of the Cherrick Center for the study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel, and between 2020 and 2022 he was appointed curator of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, with projects that saw the premiers of works by Betty Olivero, Chaya Czernowin, Oedoen Partos, Verdina Shlonsky, and others.

Shelleg’s award-winning first book, Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History, appeared in November of 2014 with Oxford University Press. The book studies the emergence of modern Jewish art music in Central and Western Europe in the early twentieth century and its partial dislocation to Palestine/Israel in the 1930s. Unearthing the cultural chain reactions this dislocation catalyzed in Hebrew culture through the 1970, the book maps composers’ gradual disillusionment with romanticist nationalism amid the dissemination of modernist compositional devices and contiguous developments in modern Hebrew literature. Jewish Contiguities won the 2015 Engel Prize for the study of Hebrew Music, and the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Shelleg’s second book Theological Stains; Art Music and the Zionist Project appeared in November of 2020 with Oxford University Press. This is the first in-depth study on art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. The book unfolds the theological and territorial infrastructures of national Hebrew culture while critically reading the works and archival collections of Mordecai Seter, Paul Ben-Haim, Oedoen Partos, Josef Tal, Ben-Zion Orgad, Marc Lavri, Andre Hajdu, Abel Ehrlich, Tzvi Avni, Betty Olivero, and Ruben Seroussi. In the process, Theological Stains discloses how importations of modernist compositional devices constituted composers’ perceptions of Jewish musical traditions as much as they facilitated their dialectical returns to diasporic Jewish cultures, returns that among other things invalidated national and territorial tropes.

Shelleg's third book, The State of Afterness: Contemporary Music in and about Israel, is expected to appear with Oxford University Press. The book traces the histories and cultural histories of contemporary music in Israel since the 1980s. With afterness defined as the state of being unconditioned by territorialism while opting for previously unavailable temporalities and ethnographies, Shelleg studies the compositional approaches that record the attenuation of territorial nationalism, and assembles networks ofcomposers trained in the post-ideological climate of the 1970s and 80s. This network that consists of operas, electronic music, orchestral, and chamber and ensemble works by Chaya Czernowin, Betty Olivero, Luciano Berio, Leon Schidlowsky, Josef Bardanashvili, Arik (Arie) Shapira, in addition Jewish oral musical traditions, and novels by David Grossman, A. B. Yehoshua, Yishai Sarid, and Ruby Namdar. While in previous eras the statist subject superseded or subsumed any competing political project, since the 1980s such self-referential acts have been losing their ability to confer homogeneity and project the monologic of national Hebrew culture and its telos. As a result, Shelleg notes, the composers discussed in this book do not form a cohesive group, yet they share constituent cultural and historical sensibilities: they opt for diasporism irrespective of their compositional approaches but refrain from universalizing Jewish diasporas (as did classic Zionism); they display postmodern patrimonies but reject their essentialist qualities; they spawn new adjacencies of musics from the Levant, making an interconnected skein of threads that leads unpredictably from one culture to another; they admonish their country’s ethnocracy and democratic façade; they denationalize the Holocaust; and they narrate the failure of territorial nationalism. In this sense, the state of afterness is a drama still etched in our everyday.

Shelleg is also a regular musical contributor to Haaretz newspaper.