REFLECTIONS

My Keegan Summer catalogs my experiences as a 2026 Michael B. Keegan Summer Traveling Fellow. This program financially supports undergraduate students at Vanderbilt University to explore topics of personal interest through experiential travel; over the course of 12 weeks, I traveled across the Mediterranean and Central Asia to discover the manifestations of historical religious coexistence (specifically Jewish minorities and non-Jewish majorities) in contemporary musical practices. This summer was transformational beyond the scope of this project, however, and I wanted to find a way to bring the spirit of this raw adventure back home through a unique medium.

My journey started in northern Greece where I interacted with religious and music culture in many ways. I spent my mornings aiding historical musicologists in the cataloging of Greek Jewish music manuscripts written in Nazi German concentration camps, and spent my evenings documenting the traditions I hear in street musician performances. A highlight of my time in the country was observing the Polyverse Ensemble, an international choir of three combined religious choirs (from a Greek synagogue, Italian monastery, and German church) on their European summer tour. It was especially eye-opening to experience how members and directors navigated language barriers and shared religious musical traditions in ways beyond words.

I then flew south to Africa, where I spent a month in Tunisia and Morocco. My project’s focus started to lose its structure as there weren’t the same academic institutions to consult. I went to local concerts, explored museum archives, and interviewed musicians and concertgoers alike to better understand their perspectives of music and religious identity. I soon learned how hard it was to distinguish the two; the music of many regions was the jumbled amalgamation of every community member past and present, leaving it virtually impossible to dissect what elements of the music were “Jewish”, “Arab”, or “Amazigh”. 

At some point in Africa, my goals of the fellowship shifted away from the rigid scholarship I had envisioned and towards the more holistic idea of experiential learning. My greatest discoveries came without expectation, and I started saying yes to increasingly unfamiliar situations. That’s how I ended up learning to drive stick shift on a Saharan desert road near the unstable Libyan border. That’s how I ended up getting scrubbed raw in a traditional Moroccan hammam with a friend I had met earlier that day. And that’s how I met my now Moroccan grandma at a 2am beach rave, eventually traveling hundreds of miles “off-course” to spend a night at her house and meet her grandchildren.

With this newfound mental freedom, I embarked on the logistically nightmarish journey from Morocco to Poland. Taking the ferry to southern Spain, I passed through Gibraltar, Malaga, Lleida, Andorra la Vella, Toulouse, Nice, Monaco, Genoa, Bologna, Lignano Sabbiadoro, Ljubljana, and Prague over the course of two weeks. While there was little time to live like a local and many uncomfortable overnights on Flixbusses, it was a unique opportunity to see the landscapes flow seamlessly on a continental scale from the Saharan sand to the mountainous Pyrenees to Mediterranean beach towns to Italian countryside and beyond. 

After a couple weeks exploring Ashkenazi lineage in Central Europe, I traveled to Tashkent, Uzbekistan for the last leg of my travels. I came specifically for the town of Bukhara, home to a unique sect of Jews with a musical lineage so distinct from everywhere else in the world. I had a chance to see traces of multireligious culture embedded into the streets, but my favorite memories came from the other towns along the way. Late-night conversations aboard sweltering overnight trains, pickup soccer games with Uzbek kids, and casual meals over tea with shopkeepers.

The final project includes a chronological montage of film taken on my iPhone... I narrowed down the footage from 843 videos and over 5 hours of recordings. I set these videos to Familiarity by the Punch Brothers; this epic of a musical narrative near-perfectly encapsulates the range of emotion and energy I experienced in my global travels. At the end of the video, I include a few broader reflections of what it means to be human.

Below are a few lines from the lyrics that I think are especially poignant:

"God knows I mean it

God help me feel it

God knows we mean it

God help us feel it..."

"Cause I've forgotten how it feels 

To love someone or thing for real"

"Though I'm not sure where we'll go

To worship more than what we know"

In true Keegan spirit, I spent my summer in the endless pursuit of knowledge, making a priority of learning within the cultural differences. Music and religion are two important pillars of communication, and I found so much joy in experiencing the many ways of expression that distinguish and connect global artistic communities.