music short essay

Klezmer - Jewish Music

What is klezmer? • musical tradition of Ashkenazi and Hassidic Jews

of Eastern Europe

• music of Yiddish-speaking Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Russia

• Hebrew words = kley - zemer (vessels/instruments of songs)

• key element of Jewish weddings

Klezmorim • Klezmorim - professional musicians in Jewish communities in

Eastern Europe who performed music for community occasions

• had low social status because they were associated with entertainment - secular

• itinerant musicians who lived at the edge of shtetls (Jewish communities)

• performed with non-Jews, including Roma

• were not professionally trained - they did not read or write music

Instrumentation

• clarinet, violin, accordion, flute, bass or cello, drum and cimbalom/tsimbl - hammered dulcimer

• klezmer intended to mimic the human voice, including sounds of laughing, crying, wailing (through “bent” notes)

Cimbalom / Tsimbl

Pale of Settlement • a policy that existed in the Russian Empire between

1791 and 1917 that forbid Jews from living in certain parts of the Empire, as well as certain cities

• shtetls- Jewish sections of towns

Tsarist laws

• In what is now Ukraine, klezmer musicians were forbidden to play loud instruments

• in 1855, Tsar Alexander II changed the rule and the clarinet replaced the violin as the instrument of choice

Klezmer - how did the music change in the US?

• Jewish immigrants began arriving in New York in the 1880s to escape pogroms (orchestrated attacks on Jewish communities)

• while musical traditions held on until the 1920s, klezmer became heavily influenced by jazz, swing

1920s • Klezmer meets jazz / big band

• second generation Jewish musicians like George Gershwin opted to move beyond “traditional” music associated with Jewish communities and joined the jazz and classical music worlds

• “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess, based on a Ukrainian lullaby

• influenced musicians like Benny Goodman, Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein

Assimilation and Revival • processes of borrowing led to klezmer, as it was

originally brought from Europe, to change dramatically and to fall away in practice in Jewish communities in the U.S. before WWII

• after WWII, Jewish immigrants who survived the war did not publicly promote traditional Jewish music

• it was not until the 1970s when the children of Holocaust survivors began to actively revive music from old recordings by klezmer musicians dating to 1910s-1920s

Klezmer today • “authentic” renditions from recordings of klezmer

greats like Dave Tarras (clarinet)

• dance tunes that are interpreted on various instruments (since we do not know exactly how klezmer sounded in Europe before WWI)

• performed as a solo revival or as part of a pan-East European fusion in the U.S. that has merged klezmer with Romani (Gypsy) and Balkan tunes and rhythms

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