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(More customer reviews)Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1924 was a co-winner of the 2003 AAASS/Orbis Books Prize for Polish Studies awarded annually for the most outstanding English-language book
on any aspect of Polish affairs.
The other winner was Jolanta T. Pekacz's Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1914 (University of Rochester Press).
The Prize committee - Izabela Kalinowska-Blackwood, Andrzej Tymowski, and Halina Filipowicz - wrote the following about the winning volumes:
Both books are exemplary monographs based on meticulous archival research. Both provide an important point of entry for exploring a lost symbolic world in a rather out-of-the-way place, at least in geopolitical terms: the multiethnic province of Galicia in the Habsburg Monarchy. Ezra Mendelsohn's elegantly written book concentrates on the work of Maurycy Gottlieb, a founding father of modern Jewish art, who was born in a small town known in Polish as Drohobycz, now associated primarily with the internationally acclaimed writer Bruno Schulz. Jolanta T. Pekacz's study addresses an understudied area - popular music genres in nineteenth-century Galicia - within a well-informed historical framework. In examing their topics, both Mendelsohn and Pekacz also tell us much about the multiethnic society of nineteenth-century Galicia - about its social tensions, divisions, and hierarchies, and about about its strength and fragility.
Mendelsohn's and Pekacz's studies not only expand our knowledge and understanding of the social and symbolic world of old Galicia, but they also challenge our tendency to think of culture - any culture - as a static and homogeneous entity (if only to make it possible to talk about it). To do justice to the complexity of their project, both Mendelsohn and Pekacz keep alive several perspectives, chief among them the perspective of cultural studies. They show that, contrary to a common misconception, cultural studies are not primarily concerned with banal populism. They agree that all forms of cultural production need to be studied - not as self-contained and independent entities, knowable apart from their own time and place, but rather in their particular historical contexts. They also agree that the perspective of cultural studies offers fresh insights into the underlying importance of literature and the arts in the formation of national identities.
Ezra Mendelsohn's Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art and Jolanta T. Pekacz's Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1914 are highly original studies on the cutting-edge of several disciplines: social history, history of ideas, cultural studies, Jewish studies, Polish studies, and Polish Jewish studies. Both books offer the rare intellectual pleasure that goes with disentangling intricate historical patterns behind the mythologized image of Galicia as a land of pride and tears, where good men and women were busy shaking the dead hand of the past.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1914 (Rochester Studies in Central Europe)
This book explores the role of music in developing the culture of Galicia -- a part of the Polish Commonwealth which belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy from the first partition of Poland in 1772 until the end of World War I. It gives a central place to the relation the people had with shared musical objects, knowledge and practices -- both domestic and imported from cultural centers such as Vienna -- and the ways in which music emphasized social cleavages, and provided individuals and groups with a national identity, sense of community, and social status.An analysis of the conditions of Galician society -- its social structure and dynamics, political and economic status, and cultural level and aspirations -- is followed by chapters on music as a commercial pursuit, as civic and moral pedagogy, as an expression of cultural identity, as communal experience, as status symbol, and as an expression of political attitudes of the Galicians. These themes illustrate the cultural use of music in Galician schools, theaters, musical societies, choirs, public concerts, and homes.How music satisfied the cultural and psychological needs of the Galicians was conditioned by a shortage of urban centers, as well asEnlightenment ideas that came from Austria with an emphasis on the education roles of the arts, a low level of industrialization, a lack of leadership by the local cultural elite, the heritage of the noble value system with its disdain for cities and urban occupations, and its quite explicit social prejudice which made it important to maintain social divisions and hierarchies. These conditions not only made the process of modernization in Galicia slower than elsewhere in Europe but also shaped it in a particular way.Jolanta T. Pekacz is professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan.
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