Henech Kon: The Jewish Sounds of Yiddish Secularism by Diana Matut

Henech Kon: The Jewish Sounds of Yiddish Secularism by Diana Matut, from Sonic Representations of Jewishness on Screen and Off at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026. Henech Kon can be considered one of the greatest composers of Yiddish music in the twentieth century. His oeuvre ranges from opera and musical theater to art song and nigunim, from film scores to kleynkunst and children's songs. While his works are true and broad sonic representations of Jewishness, he was considered the secular Yiddish composer par excellence. This lecture wants to explore Kon's musical work for the stage, its connectivity with Jewish cultures and the frame of Yiddish secularism before and after Second World War. Dr. Diana Matut teaches Old Yiddish and Jewish Music at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She is director of the Old Synagogue – House of Jewish Culture in Essen. She was the Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow in East European Jewish Arts, Music, and Theatre at YIVO (New York) and Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (three times). From 2019 to 2020 Diana Matut was the convenor of the Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies and led a research group focusing on "Jewish Musical Cultures in Europe, 1500-1750." In 2021 she was awarded the Mare-Balticum-Fellowship of the University of Rostock. In 2019 Diana, together with American composer/arranger Josh Horowitz, lead the Henech Kon project, which brought the only surviving pre-war Yiddish opera from Europe back on stage (https://omaworks.eu/triangle-orchestra/). Various musical projects are the result of her cooperation with Yiddish Summer Weimar, among them the Young Kadya Choir, a German-Israeli project which became the focus of a documentary; a CD with rediscovered Yiddish children’s songs called “Far dem nayem dor – For the new generation” and the “Glikl oratorye”, focusing on the life of early modern Jewish woman Glikl Hameln, which Diana wrote together with Alan Bern.