Musical Remembering with the "Old Lady": Cultural Biography of the Organ in Prague's Jeruzalémská Synagogue with a Focus on Its Present-day Revival
Abstract
Musical practices can become both the subject and the means of both individual and collective remembering. In the following case study based on my ethnographic fieldwork among the Jewish community in Prague, I understand musical practices as a performative means of constructing certain imagined, culturally-specific continuities from the past, in the present.
Since remembering is a selective practice, I am interested in the process itself: what is remembered, what is revived in the present, and what is not? How is the dis/continuity negotiated in practice? The cultural biography of the newly-reconstructed, 113-year-old organ (the "Old Lady") in the currently Orthodox Jeruzalémská Synagogue in Prague reveals an interesting case of a local Jewish community negotiating important values and ideas about the past and belonging. In its newly-established regime of use and value, this formerly ritual object becomes constitutive of localized musical remembrance and a means of reconciling the claims of diverse actors across religious borders.