Music of "the Foreign Nations" or "Native Culture" : concert programming in interwar Lwów as a discourse about Jewish musical identities

The First World War put an end to the existence of Galicia as a political entity. Galicia's previous cultural and administrative center, Lvov, became absorbed into the Polish State in 1919. The city became the capital of the Voivodeship as well as the cultural center of South-Eastern Poland. Almost as soon as the Polish-Ukrainian fight for Lvov had come to an end, Lvovian Jews reactivated their cultural life and established their Jewish Music Society, soon replaced by the music section of Jewish Artistic-Literary Society, as well as other Jewish musical institutions. While one might think that the promotion of Jewish music would be their priority, this was not always true. An analysis of concert repertoire of both organizations allows to distinguish 3 different phases of Jewish musical environment’s official cultural policy in interwar Lvov: the first phase was rejection of nationalism in music, the second their affirmation, and the third one was synthesis of these with European art music.