This thoroughly researched biography, commissioned by Verna Fine, widow of the composer, is a highly readable entree not only to the life and works of Irving Fine, but to the history of the Brandeis University Department of Music. Irving Fine was a highly creative and innovative composer, and became the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music and Chairman of the School of Creative Arts at Brandeis. His inventive leadership of a newly formed Creative Arts Department would set the tone and course of study for the next 50 years. Fine had taught theory and music history at Harvard from 1939-50, when he joined the music faculty of Brandeis in Fall, 1950, as Lecturer in Music and Composer in Residence. Fine’s intellect led him to a style of “Stravinskian neoclassicism and romatically inflected serialism” that was to catch the imagination and close friendship of the American musical luminaries of the day, including Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky, composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, and his Brandeis colleagues Harold Shapero and Arthur Berger.…
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For Jews, the terms “assimilating” or “assimilation” are charged. Many unpleasant associations arise with thoughts of Jews “assimilating into” or disappearing altogether into, general society; becoming like others. As Jonathan Sarna says in the introduction to his new book, American Judaism,: “Through the years, ‘assimilation’ has become so freighted with different meanings, modifiers, and cultural associations that for analytical purposes it has become virtually meaningless. In some Jewish circles, indeed, the term is regularly employed as an epithet.” But “assimilating” is a term that the dictionary states, also means, “absorbing”, or “to take in and appropriate.” It can mean a “healthy appropriation of new forms and ideas.” In this book, David Schiller bravely makes distinctions with something that “happened in a more or less remote past or that is happening now.” Using the term in the title is not only eyecatching, but essential to his thesis about the nature of Jewish art music.…
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So many Americans are just unaware of the accomplishments and achievements of Canadians. Possibly this is more ignorance than snobbery, but sometimes it seems to be a bit of both, without good reason for either. This snobbery particularly extends, it seems, in music. Our friends in Canada continually prove themselves extremely worthy, and yet notions to the otherwise persist. Fortunately, Canadians are a patient people and their accomplishments continue to shine and speak on their behalf. One such accomplished and distinguished musician is Alexander Brott. If you haven’t heard of him, then perhaps this memoir, published on the occasion of his 90th birthday, and written with the help of Betty Nygaard King, will be an antidote.

The book is an autobiographical memoir about his life as a violinist, conductor, composer, teacher and producer.…
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Yale Strom has written a book with enormous effort that supplies the reader with good access to extensive quotations by klezmer musicians, translations of previous scholarly works into English, 3 superb appendices, a bibliography, a very nice discography and an index. The purpose of the book is to give an overall history of klezmer music, with its growth in Eastern Europe and a look at the current scene and it’s meaning today.

Strom spent several years researching the material, conducting interviews of klezmer musicians in America and Europe, and having materials translated into English. Over a twenty-year period, he made some fifty trips to Eastern Europe doing ethnographic research. Details supplied by photographic plates and the extensive quotations from his interviews abound in the book.

A highlight of special note in this book is Appendix 1, “Klezmer Zikhroynes in di Yizker Bikher,” (Klezmer remembrances in the Memorial Books).…
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