Dr. Efrat Urbach
I am a musicologist who explores questions of faith and identity. My work investigates intersections between musical aesthetics, theology/ideology, and their interplay in a wide lens. I am interested in the ways in which musicians and composers interact with liturgical, political or poetic texts and how this dialectic process shapes phenomenology of worship and identity in audiences.
I received my PhD in musicology from Bar-Ilan University in May 2025. My dissertation explored the sacred oeuvre of agnostic Frech composer Gabriel Fauré and contextualized it through the prism of the French Symbolist movement. My interdisciplinary focus included excursions into music cognition, the study of early sociology, religious studies, and phenomenology of religion to enhance the historic musicology based musical analysis.
At the Polonsky Academy, I will be exploring the musical Amen as a pervasive, interreligious and crosscutting element of Abrahamic worship, mostly focusing on notated European traditions of the past 500 years.
In 2024 I spent a semester at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSoC) in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and in 2025 was a visiting scholar at the faculty of music at the University of Cambridge. I also spent a semester at the faculty of music / faculty of theology at the University of Strasbourg as Erasmus fellow in 2022. I hold an MA in musicology from Bar-Ilan university and BA in behavioral studies from Ben Gurion university.
Publications:
« AMEN ! ET AMEN ? À PROPOS DES DIFFÉRENTES FORMES D’AMEN MUSICAUX DANS LE TANTUM ERGO FRANÇAIS DE LA FIN DU XIXE SIÈCLE », Le motet en France, du Second Empire à la Belle Époque : histoire, écriture, pratique et diffusion. ed. Isabelle Bretaudeau, Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2025.
“Above the Darkness of the Abyss”: “Melodies” as a Case Study of the Israeli Lament in Changing Conditions of Uncertainty, Kri’ot Israeliyot, June 2024 (in Hebrew).
“On Waters’s Miriam and Youssef.” Jewish Film & New Media, vol. 8, no. 2, Wayne State University Press, 2020, pp. 293–302, https://doi.org/10.13110/jewifilmnewmedi.8.2.0293. Co-authored with Netta Schramm