People | Faculty | Philip V. Bohlman

Philip V. Bohlman

Appointments:

Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College

Education:

Ph.D., University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign

Contact:

Office: Goodspeed 211
Phone: 773-702-0514
Email: boh6@uchicago.edu

Photo: Dan Dry

In his teaching and research, Philip V. Bohlman combines ethnographic and historical approaches to understand the many processes in which music generates multiple forms of human identity: cultural and national, political and aesthetic, ethnic and racial, sacred and secular, gender and sexuality. Bohlman searches for musical meaning in sites of in-betweenness, particularly those formed by displacement and disjuncture in modernity. Jewish music has long provided a center for his work, particularly the presence of music in the shaping of European Jewish communities and Israel. Religious interests extend from this concern for Jewish music, for example, to studies of sacred music in North America and Islam in Europe, as well as forms of sacred music-making, such as pilgrimage and prayer. As a scholar, Bohlman is committed to fieldwork, with current projects ranging from the Eurovision Song Contest to the study of Jewish communities in India. He is also an active translator, both of the texts and contexts in which music participates, for example, in his preparation of a book containing Johann Gottfried Herder’s writings on music and nationalism. Musical scholarship does not depart from music-making, so Bohlman is not only a pianist but also the Artistic Director of the University of Chicago ensemble-in-residence, the “New Budapest Orpheum Society,” a seven-member cabaret that has released three CDs.

Recent Courses Taught

  • Music and Islam in Europe (seminar)
  • Global Film Musicals (area studies)
  • The Eurovision Song Contest (seminar)
  • The Noise of the Imperial City (seminar, Center for Disciplinary Innovation)
  • Ethnographic Methods (proseminar)
  • Indian Religion and the Arts (College Core course)

Selected Works

  • Jewish Music and Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New (ed. by Philip V. Bohlman). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
  • The Musical Anthropology of the Mediterranean: Interpretation, Performance, Identity (coedited with Marcello Sorce Keller). Bologna: Clueb, 2008.
  • So Their Voices Will Not Fall Silent: Jewish Cabaret in Exile. CD of the New Budapest Orpheum Society. Cedille Records, 2008.
  • Music in American Religious Experience (coedited with Edith Blumhofer and Maria Chow). New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  • Jüdische Volksmusik – Eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte. Vienna: Böhlau, 2005.
  • The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004. 2nd ed., revised: New York: Routledge, 2009.
  • Celtic Modern: Music of the Global Fringe (ed. with Martin Stokes). Lanham: Scarecrow, 2003.
  • World Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Translated into Hungarian, Japanese, Italian, Greek, and Kurdish.
  • Music and the Racial Imagination (coedited with Ronald Radano). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.