In April 1935, a year and a half after the Nazi purge of Jewish academics forced him from his position as music librarian in Berlin, comparative musicologist Robert Lachmann arrived in Palestine with the goal of creating an “Oriental Music Archive” at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Prior to his arrival in Palestine, Lachmann had established himself as an expert in Arab and Eastern Jewish musics, working within the comparative framework of “Berlin School” associated with Hornbostel and Sachs, two of his early supporters. He completed his doctoral thesis on the music of Tunisian prisoners in 1924, collaborated on a translation of al-Kindi, published his Musik des Orients in 1929, and chaired the committee on recording at the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music. He completed research Jewish Cantillation and Song in the Isle of Djerba in 1935, just before he began work on the Oriental Music Archive. Working against the constraints of a university struggling to support a wave of exiled German-Jewish academics, though with the support of Chancellor Judah Magnes, Lachmann made 956 metal disc recordings of non-European oral traditions in and around Jerusalem between 1935 and his early death in 1939.

The establishment of the Palestine Broadcasting Service in March 1936 provided a welcome opportunity for public outreach and a chance to defend these traditions against what Lachmann saw as the onslaught of European music, and he presented twelve radio programmes under the title “Oriental Music” between November 1936 and April 1937, each accompanied by live performances or recordings. Ruth Katz reproduced much of the text to the programmes in an appendix to The Lachmann Problem (Reference Katz2003), but this volume demonstrates that a more comprehensive edition was well worth the effort.

Davis’s project in The Oriental Music Broadcasts is an innovative presentation of these programmes, transcribed and edited from the original scripts with substantial annotation and commentary, including digitised and restored recordings on two accompanying compact discs and transcriptions of these musical examples. Davis’s editorial additions, in cogent footnotes and commentary following each programme, situate Lachmann’s work against that of his immediate predecessors—most consistently Hornbostel and Abraham Idelsohn—and younger contemporaries like Ragheb Moftah and Edith Gerson-Kiwi.

The twelve programmes present a wide range of topics: chant and liturgical songs from Yemenite and Kurdish Jewish, Coptic, and Samaritan traditions (programmes 2, 3, 4, and 6), Bedouin sung poetry (5), folk musics of the Eastern and Western Arab world (10 and 11), “Arab Urban Music” (9), and Yemenite-Jewish and Palestinian Muslim wedding songs (7, 8, and 12.) Davis views Lachmann’s explicit desire to situation Jewish musics within a broader web of “Oriental” traditions as a decision with political as well as intellectual import, especially in light of subsequent work by Gerson-Kiwi and others that focused more on the nationalistic possibilities of research into the historical trajectories of Jewish music in Israel (see also Davis Reference Davis2010).

Despite the book’s subtitle, “A Music Ethnography of Mandate Palestine,” and Lachmann’s hope that his archive would be of value to subsequent ethnologists, ethnography in the classic sense was not central to Lachmann’s unapologetically comparative project. In his programme featuring Kurdish Jewish cantillation for example, Lachmann spends only the introductory and concluding paragraphs discussing the tradition featured on the programmes, instead devoting the bulk of his comments to a wide-ranging discussion of shamanistic vocal practices across cultures. As such, a reader looking for specific ethnographic insight into the sonic practices of 1936 Palestine will view the recordings themselves, rather than Lachmann’s commentary, to be the central contribution of this volume.

One example of the intriguing intellectual juxtapositions offered by Davis comes in an editorial note to the twelfth in Lachmann’s series. This final and most locally situated programme offers “an idea of what is ordinarily heard at a village wedding in central Palestine” through musical examples and descriptions informed by trips to villages like Artas, where Lachmann conducted his first recording session outside of Jerusalem in June 1935 (p. xxxii). As Davis identifies, this village had recently been the site of sustained ethnographic work by the Swedish-Finnish scholar Hilma Grandqvist, and she contrasts Lachmann’s programme with a series of excepts from Grandqvist’s Marriage Conditions in a Palestinian Village (1935). Not claiming that Lachmann drew directly from Grandqvist’s work for his programme, Davis’ juxtaposition of Lachmann’s script with Grandqvist’s more detailed ethnographic description of a wedding in the same village both fleshes out the scene that the musical examples are meant to demonstrate and highlights Grandqvist’s contemporaneous critique of the limitations of comparatist methodology.

Davis’s introduction and editorial commentary moves deftly across the intellectual history of ethnomusicology as she points readers to both the early comparative scholarship that was the background for Lachmann’s understanding of the “oriental” musics under discussion, and to subsequent work on each tradition. These invocations to subsequent scholarship do much to obviate disagreements that specialists will have with some of Lachmann’s characterisations, written as they were for a general audience in 1936. Other minor complaints, such as the lack of an index to the volume, are overwhelmed by the scrupulousness of Davis’s contextualisation and presentation of the programmes.

The Oriental Music Broadcasts will be of value to scholars in multiple disciplines of music studies as well as those interested in radio, sound archives, and mandate Palestine more generally. Davis’s work provides a remarkable window into the intellectual history of comparative musicology and ethnomusicology, centred on the too-brief career of Robert Lachmann, and in doing so offers a glimpse into the diversity of oral traditions present in mandate Palestine.