Benjy FOX-ROSEN, MA
(Principal Investigator of "Challenging the Theater of Memory: Yiddish Song beyond Kitsch and Stereotype")
Benjy Fox-Rosen (Los Angeles, 1984) is a musician and researcher based in Vienna, Austria. He is the conductor of the Vienna Stadttempel Choir accompanying Cantor Shmuel Barzilai weekly. As a singer and bass player, Fox-Rosen has performed at Celebrate Brooklyn (USA), the Chicago World Music Festival (USA), Wiener Festwochen (AU), and Krakow Jewish Festival (PL) as well as many other festivals and venues throughout the Americas and Europe. He has taught workshops at the New England Conservatory, Tufts University, the University of Performing Arts Vienna (mdw) and other institutions. As a composer, Fox-Rosen has been commissioned to write works for choirs, artistic interventions, and audio-installations. He has produced three recordings of his own music, two of which were recognized by the Forward in the top-five Jewish music album of the year category.
Fox-Rosen wrote his Masters thesis on the musical practice of the choir of the Stadttempel synagogue at the Institute for Musicology of the University of Vienna. This project uses ethnographic research methods to address questions of musical change, meaning and continuity. Fox-Rosen has also published scholarly reflections on his own artistic practice, focusing on questions of translation in the performance of Yiddish song, particularly in the German speaking world.