Building on questions of how music shapes identities and determines belonging and political participation, this talk explores how musical practices can also be mobilized to intervene in politics of belonging—not just of one’s own group, but across groups through solidarity. While music establishes boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, it can also forge alliances that transcend, complicate, or challenge conventional notions of national and ethnic belonging. Rather than focusing solely on textual or representational aspects of political music, I investigate how musical practice enables forms of political articulation that operate through embodied, affective registers among minoritarian communities.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary Yiddish music practices, this talk explores how musical solidarity works through two different cases. The first examines collaborative projects between displaced Ukrainian and Berlin-based Jewish musicians, exploring shared transcultural heritage and musical affinities, thereby countering propagandistic narratives of the Russian regime. The second looks at a compilation album of new Yiddish songs in solidarity with Palestinians, published in response to the destruction of Gaza, where music works through exploring entanglements of historical experiences and acknowledgment of responsibility within structural inequalities. 

These cases illuminate how musical practice engages in affective politics, creating embodied forms of political articulation that exceed textual and representational modes of solidarity. Through an analysis of musical solidarity, this talk contributes to understanding how minoritarian alliances might be forged through cultural practice, thereby extending frameworks of music, citizenship and belonging beyond group identities toward coalitional possibilities – a particularly urgent question given the current political moment of increasing authoritarianism.

Isabel Frey is a Senior Artist and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw) and a Yiddish singer. She completed her PhD at mdw in 2024 on contemporary transmission and performance of Yiddish folksong, and was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies in 2023. She co-led the arts-based pilot research project “Challenging the Theater of Memory: Yiddish Song beyond Kitsch and Stereotype” (2022–2024) with Benjy Fox-Rosen at the Music and Minorities Research Center. She is currently the principal investigator of the FWF-funded project “(Un)heard Neighbors: An urban ethnomusicology of proximity“, (TAI1016625, 2025–2027). Outside academia, she is a sought-after performer and teacher of Yiddish song, tours internationally and has released three albums of Yiddish song. 

Find further info on her website Isabel Frey.