Year
2013
Cute Boy, Charming Girl
Children's Songs of the Modern Hebrew Nation (1882-1948)
The Chicago Manual of Style
Cute Boy, Charming Girl: Children's Songs of the Modern Hebrew Nation (1882-1948). Edited by Efrat Leibowitz and Edwin Seroussi. Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel, vol. 23. Jerusalem, Israel: Jewish Music Research Centre, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2013. CD.
Cute Boy, Charming Girl: Children’s Songs of the Modern Hebrew Nation(1882-1948) presents Hebrew songs written for and sung by Jewish children in pre-state Israel. The selection represents highlights in the development of this genre in the first half of the twentieth century. It includes poems by canonical poets that were set to music by professional composers, songs by amateur poets and composers, translated songs, and borrowed melodies.
Most of the songs chosen for Cute Boy, Charming Girl are not part of today’s children’s repertoire in Israel but they were rather well-known in the past. They cannot be found today, either on commercial recordings or online. In addition, the recordings here are sung by adults who sang these songs in their childhood— either in pre-school, kindergarten or elementary school, or else at home with their parents.
Performers: Naomi Abeles, Penina Abramson, Gil Aldema, Haim Barkai, Miriam Cohen, Talila Eliram, Shimon Felman, Ruth Freed, Bilhah Korakin, Miriam (Bat Avraham) Levitin, Yaakov Mazon, Herzliya Raz, Shulamit Rosenfeld, Raya Rotem, Bat Ami Zmiri.
See Song of the Month February 2014, which includes fascinating elaborations about the song Para Para (cow cow) from the CD.
You can download MP3s at Amazon, or find it on Apple Music.
