Klezmer

This document details hundreds of collections of Yiddish songs published c. 1900-2002, including information about language and script use, categorization of songs, and whether musical notation is included. The list is not exhaustive, but includes material held in many prominent collections. I compiled this index as part of my PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 2004) and am making it available here in .pdf form for anyone interested.

Over the past decade, a new genre - «klezmer music» - has surfaced in the music world. Rooted in easter European Jewish instrumental music and Yiddish song, klezmer has become popular throughout the world, even in countries where Jews are note (or are no longer) present, and where this form of music originally did not exist. Italy - where the extreme popularity this music enjoys has overshadowed local Jewish traditions - presents an interesting study case. «Klezmer» has become a synonym for «Jewish», and denotes a (musical) culture that is believed to live in a transnational and multicultural world outside history. This article reviews recent scholarship on the definition and history of traditional klezmer repertoires, explores general trends in the klezmer revival, and shows how the Italian «klezmer scene» tends to present a repertoire devoid of traditional and Jewish content, while at the same time shaping a «usable tradition» and a new «aesthetic of the old».

In secular Jewish American music, the 1950s through 1970s are often viewed by scholars and musicians as a period of discontinuity.  Building on Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (2002) call for a greater understanding of music from this time, I show that the work of second generation klezmorim, the children of immigrant klezmorim, maintained the traditional characteristics of their predecessors and foreshadowed the creative innovations of the klezmer revitalization beginning in the late 1970s.  Drawing from recordings of select second generation klezmorim- Ray and Sammy Musiker, Sidney Beckerman, and Marty Levitt- and from interviews with Pete Sokolow, Dave Levitt, Margot Leverett, and other contemporary klezmorim, I will present the repertoire of the selected performers that demonstrates the trends in mid-century Jewish instrumental music. The mid-century klezmorim did not merely preserve a waning tradition, they primed the scene for the changes to follow, through the continued development of the bulgar genre, incorporation of popular American dance styles, more rapidly changing and complex harmonic progressions, and increased use chromaticism and the major scale. These klezmorim inhabited an audiotopia, a social space and time of musical contradiction, where the seemingly opposite binaries of Jewish cultural tradition and American popular culture, religious and profane, English and Yiddish coexisted.  Their careers, repertoire, and musical advancements are evidence of the shifting sensibilities in Jewish music and the increasing fluidity of Jewish American identity throughout the twentieth century.

As a living and constantly adapting mode of expression, virtually all music is hybrid to some extent. The history of the Jews is filled with dispersed and migratory sub-groups who incorporated local sounds from the places they settled. Folklorist and singer Ruth Rubin put it this way: “Jewish folk music is as diverse and variegated as the Jews themselves.”  What distinguishes “postmodern” mixtures from older blends we intuitively recognize as klezmer is the degree and overtness with which ingredients are stewed together. In our age of music streaming, mass migrations, cross-cultural collaborations, and boundary blurring, openminded musicians inevitably experiment with more styles.

Now available the download of the book "The Tonal Phenomenon", the new paradigm for the Music Theory and the Modern Harmony in the 21th Century. This book can be the experts delight, and can open a new way to the Functional Harmony for the students.
- The first chapter explains the fractal feature of time in music and the superposition of the different layers of the melodic and harmonic rhythms.
- The secnd chapter explains the tripe basic phemonenon, contributing with all the necessary concepts for the system functionality comprehensively.
- The third chapter explains the use of the chromaticism over the three tonal genders through the Tonal Parallelism, generalizing and reviewing the Secondary and Substitute Dominants and the Modal Interchange, and covering the Jazz, the Klezmer, and the Flamenco musics.
- The fourth chapter explains the Cante Jondo melodic schemes, which define new harmonic rhythms that have no been explained before by the formal theory.
- The appendices are a comprehensive formalization of the sonorous spectrums that derives from the use of the analytic tonal tools as a constructive method over the chromaticism, and they actually conforms the "tonal reality".

http://www.armoniamoderna.com/res/thetonalphenomenon.pdf
http://www.armoniamoderna.com/res/examples.zip

Îmi aduc aminte cu mare plăcere perioada adolescentină, cînd în fiecare marți și miercuri dupăamiază mă grăbeam la repetițiile ansamblului și corului Hakeshet, care funcționa în cadrul Comunității Evreiești din Oradea. Cîntam la chitară și banjo în formația de klezmer al acestui ansamblu. Ascultam muzici de cu totul altă factură acasă, dar aveam un puternic sentiment că între muzica jazz, rock, blues, muzica contemporană și piesele klezmer-pe care le cîntam cu atăta implicare și drag-există o legătura oarecum ancestrală și firească. Din fericire aveam acces, aproape nelimitat, la pulsul timpului ceea ce privește evoluția muzicală din lume. Făceam parte dintr-o rețea de distribuție quasi ilegală a discurilor vinil și a filmelor pe casete video. Prin această conjuctură mă puteam mîndri cu o colecție impresionantă de discuri. Nu aveam încă 15 ani, dar cunoșteam bine deja muzica de jazz și rock disponibilă la acea oră. De atunci m-am dedicat carierei muzicale, știam exact ce vreau să devin cînd voi fi mare… mi-am urmat visul și îmi trăiesc iluzia din care mi-am creat realitatea existențială. Simțămîntul de legătură dintre jazz/blues/rock și klezmer mă urmărește cu obsesie de atunci. În paginile care urmează voi încerca (fără pretenția epuizării subiectului) să găsesc acele puncte de conexiune-atît muzicale cît și social/istorice-care au creat ceea ce pot denumi parte din coloană sonoră a existenței mele.

During the summer of 2017, a musically and culturally diverse group of fifteen young  musicians  from  Haifa,  Israel,  and  fifteen  from  Weimar,  Germany,  came  together  for  ten days in each city to form the “Caravan Orchestra,” a new ensemble that sought to  reopen lost musical connections between cognate Jewish, Arabic, and European rep- ertories. Seeking to explore an “often-overlooked historical, transnational cultural matrix”  rooted  in  the  long  arc  of  the  Ottoman  empire,  the  Caravan  project  proved  to be a wider voyage of discovery, in which a large group of stakeholders from two countries—ethnomusicologists, musicians, students, funders and institutions—ex- plored what such a conversation might entail. Like many intensive musical projects,  the Caravan Orchestra was a transformative experience for many of those involved, marked by the exhilaration of producing good music on a concert stage and validated by audience applause, dancing and ovations. Yet beyond aesthetic satisfaction, what kind of insights can such a project offer into the “disrupted musical histories” that it  seeks to explore? In this article, I explore this question via three elements of the Caravan experience: musicianship, repertory, and identities.

This dissertation uses three case studies to explore theories of Tradition, Transgression and Cosmopolitanism within Downtown New York’s Radical Jewish music scene. These case studies: Uri Caine’s Moloch, The Masada String Trio’s Azazel and David Krakauer’s Pruflas, are drawn from John Zorn’s Book of Angels series released on his label Tzadik, a hub of avant- garde Jewish music making. In each case study, different facets of transgressive practice are explored with particular consideration of the interaction of the tropes of Contemporary Music, Jazz and Klezmer. This discussion explores the ways these musicians manipulate musical tropes, aesthetics and ideologies to accumulate cultural capital.

Here I examine the music and discourse of two Swedish non-Jewish chamber klezmer bands, and their strategies for claiming klezmer and distancing it from Jews. One band claims that klezmer, having always been subject to travel and outside influence, was never really Jewish. The other suggests that klezmer was inherited by European non-Jews after the Holocaust. Both arguments are predicated on the Herderian nationalist denial of cultural ownership to landless peoples. I argue that these claims are ultimately about allowing Swedes to mitigate their anxieties concerning Middle-Eastern immigration, by granting them possession of a safely domesticated form of Easternness.

The terms "klezmer" and "Klezmer music" appeared in the articles about
Ashkenazi musical culture in Russian in the 1920th-1930th.In the US
and Europe, they were used much later, in 1970th. But now these terms
became almost synonymous. The term "klezmer" refers to music style or
genre.
The article is devoted to the roots for changing the concept of "klezmer" and to it's contemporary meaning.

Слова "клезмер" и "клезмерская музыка" начали использоваться в
русскоязычных исследованиях, посвященных ашкеназской музыкальной культуре, в первой трети ХХ века. В англоязычной литературе они появились значительно позже, в конце 1970-х годов. В современных зарубежных исследованиях эти термины стали почти синонимами: понятие "клезмер" сегодня относят к стилю или жанру.
В статье анализируются причины изменения понятия "клезмер" и его современное содержание.

Jewish identity has undergone major changes in the American Diaspora. Relentless oppression in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries meant that immigration to America surged, particularly during 1880-1924 (Netsky 2002). Immigrants found themselves in a country of greater equality, prosperity and opportunity, but one in which assimilation and cultural survival were problematic. This essay presents a tripartite schema for the role of Klezmer in American-Jewish identity, in which music serves as a conduit for survivalist discourse, moving from particularism to assimilation and returning anew to particularism during the revival of the 1970s and 80s. Firstly, it connected America’s working class Jewish population both to their past and to each other, maintaining a particularist Jewish identity (Slobin 2000). Secondly, under assimilatory pressures, the next generation broke with their European past to connect to an American future. Here, Klezmer provided a cultural platform for assimilation while maintaining a modicum of Jewish identity (Sapoznik 2006). Thirdly, with mass assimilation and gentrification Klezmer was re-employed, as a middle class reaction to the boredom of homogeneity and the search for a new Jewish identity. This essay will first consider identity theory, and then seek to validate this Schema.

Historically an instrument of indeterminate status, the klezmer accordion in Berlin is today a creative space around which concepts of style,
idiom, and ensemble communication are performed and negotiated. Through detailed interview material with the disproportionate number of world-class practitioners active in the city, this article traces the role and network relations of the instrument in contemporary klezmer music. In the process it reveals a richly textured approach that makes creative use of the accordion’s cultural ambiguity and musical versatility while at the same time highlighting the tensions surrounding performance aesthetics, personal expression, and being “in the tradition.”

For ‘revival’ musics the issues of musical creativity, style and development are tightly bound up with historical concerns. Unravelling musics’ “recourse to the past” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995: 370) is therefore essential to understanding the nature of music in the present. Klezmer is of particular interest here as the essential destruction of the music’s original context in the Holocaust, and the dearth of surviving musicians to transmit the tradition at the time of the revival, means that memory, nostalgia and imagination are key tools for modern musicians as they seek to recreate, retain and develop this musical tradition. This discussion focuses on a key revival figure, clarinettist and mandolin player, Andy Statman. While there are clear limitations in attempting to expand directly from the experience of one musician to generalise about musical practice as a whole, this discussion considers Statman as an archetype for consideration of issues connecting identity, mannerism and performance style, and the development and proliferation of musical styles within the current Klezmer scene. The aim of this essay is to begin to shape a theoretical framework expanding on the work of previous scholars, incorporating the impact of external factors on musical ‘mannerism’ (Katz 1970) whilst still maintaining a theoretical space for the vision of the musical auteur. This framework will consider the importance of historical resources, both real and imagined, when constructing the present and seek to underscore the importance of the manipulation of musical tropes in the construction of musical meaning.

Although it claims little historical connection to klezmer music or Yiddish culture, the city of Berlin has hosted one of the most dynamic klezmer scenes of the past 20 years. This article analyses ways that place has been made to function as a meaningful unit in the music and lyrics of several artists living and working in Berlin, localising the transnational klezmer revival discourse by rooting the city in their music. Building on Adam Krims’ theory of ‘urban ethos’, I explore how the contemporary city is emplaced in its klezmer music, arguing that these processes of signification allow us to hear contrasting articulations of Berlin. The native Berliners ?Shmaltz! frame their city as an escapist gateway, the American songwriter Daniel Kahn sees a site of painfully unresolved history and the internationalist Knoblauch Klezmer band locate Berlin as an embodiment of playfully multilingual performativity.

Аннотация. В статье представлено исследование последних двух лет по воссозданию жизненного и творческого пути одной из самых загадочных личностей в истории исполнительского искусства первой половины XIX в. – Михаила-Иосифа Гузикова, создателя т. н. «деревянно-соломенного инстру- мента» (более известного как четырехрядный ксилофон) и «первого виртуо- за» игры на нем. За это время была собрана огромная база источников – свыше тысячи документов, так или иначе связанных с именем М.-И. Гузикова. Из них были отобраны только прижизненные свидетельства, и уже из по- следних было успешно обработано около ста источников, что составило при- мерно 10 % всей базы. Таким образом, проанализировав часть выборки, уда- лось выстроить сравнительно линейную хронологическую ретроспективу без явных повествовательных пробелов, давшую относительно полную кар- тину гастрольного тура М.-И. Гузикова в 1834–1837 гг. При этом необходимо учитывать, что остается еще очень много белых пятен, мелких неточностей, требующих разъяснений и дополнений. В т. ч. стоит уделить внимание проблематике ранних лет жизни виртуоза, о которой сохранились скудные сведения, перемешанные с народными преданиями.
Ильин, Ф. С. Промежуточные итоги реконструкции биографии М.-И. Гузикова / Ф. С. Ильин // Культура Беларуси: реалии современности : X Международная научно-практическая конференция (Минск, 7 октября 2021 г.) : сборник научных статей / Белорусский государственный университет культуры и искусств. - Минск, 2021. - С. 134-142 : ил. - Библиогр.: с. 141-142 (26 назв.).

Intro and contents page downloadable from Ashgate website (see links below)

The dawn of the twenty-first century marked a turning period for American Yiddish culture. The 'Old World' of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe was fading from living memory - yet at the same time, Yiddish song enjoyed a renaissance of creative interest, both among a younger generation seeking reengagement with the Yiddish language, and, most prominently via the transnational revival of klezmer music.

The last quarter of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first saw a steady stream of new songbook publications and recordings in Yiddish - newly composed songs, well-known singers performing nostalgic favourites, American popular songs translated into Yiddish, theatre songs, and even a couple of forays into Yiddish hip hop; musicians meanwhile engaged with discourses of musical revival, post-Holocaust cultural politics, the transformation of language use, radical alterity and a new generation of American Jewish identities. This book explores how Yiddish song became such a potent medium for musical and ideological creativity at the twilight of the twentieth century, presenting an episode in the flowing timeline of a musical repertory - New York at the dawn of the twenty-first century - and outlining some of the trajectories that Yiddish song and its singers have taken to, and beyond, this point.