This journey from melody to silence has been, let's face it, a little weird. But of course that's been the point. By opening up the scope of our investigation to include wider critical and historical points of view, we've made room for more of our actual selves in the music. The goal has been to move from the realm of mere signification and into something that enables participation on many levels. Hey, culture is weird.
I’ve sprinkled some practical ideas throughout this series but here are a few more final suggestions:
Getting Under Melody
The goal of creating convivial social spaces should encourage us to think outside the limits of just musical performance, but, if I had to boil the whole thing down to one sentence, I'd say: Play the song longer than you think you should.1
You can feel the weight of this entire archaeological dig in the difference between playing a song three times through and say, thirteen times. Ending a song after playing the melody two or three times gives you that quick shot of validation. It’s lovely and there’s nothing wrong with it. But it also protects you and the other musicians from having to show your cards or feel anything too weird.
If you keep playing right past where you normally end, you will be faced with decisions. What exactly do I do besides play the melody? The awkwardness you may feel is the sudden sensitivity to the others around you. What are the rules here? You feel exposed and challenged. This is good! But without some kind of ideological fortification and support, it will probably just collapse into nervous laughter.2
That awkward moment is the sign that the music is emerging out of its shrink-wrapped, commodity form and into relationship with others (be they the people in front of you, ancestors, bodies, cosmic forces). It’s a good place to start.
Give Credit to Musicians
My wife learned how to ferment from a combination of DIY punks in an anarchist co-op house and lil ol' southern grandmas. At the same time, the well-paid nutrition experts were busy telling us it was OK to remove all the health benefits from traditional ferments so that they could be shipped and sold more easily. Decades later, that same expert class, still plush with their good salaries and benefits, suddenly discovered- "Hey! We should ferment stuff!" They were rewarded with more jobs, more money and more status. Meanwhile the punks and grandmas, who had been keeping that culture alive for decades (the grandmas, centuries), continued to live in poverty and were given no credit, financial or otherwise, for their contributions.
I see the same dynamic with music. The experts in this case are the musical academics who use music to prove that the status quo is the best and only way things can ever be. Their main tool is to present themselves and this situation as normal.
Psychic Courtyardism rages against their dark demoralizing magic. But how to undo it? The 20th century is full of failed attempts. In the past, weirdness has been paired with ecstatic culture to create Cirkus klezmer. I applaud the desire to use the music to create situations, but it’s sometimes been an awkward fit. Alas, we aren’t the Pogues.3
But what does historically-informed weirdness paired with equanimity look like? What if we were as loyal to the social aims of klezmer as we were to krekhts? What if we spent a fraction of the time that we spend on archival melodies in the old imagination of freedom and space?
Awareness Magic
A friend hands you a slice of chocolate cake they just made. You take a bite. They then tell you they put a few blueberries they picked this morning in it. You take another bite. This time you taste blueberry. Same cake, different flavors.
Let’s be real: This series isn’t going to change much of anything. So why all this fuss? Because, even if a world of freaky, historically-informed, non-commodified socio-musical experiments never materializes, just being aware of these dynamics will bring them to life. Awareness is the world we are building, and, if you’ve read this far, the work is already done.
Acknowledgments
Josh Horowitz has been kindly supportive of me during this project (“supportive” not meant to equal “agreement” of course). His own musical, theater and educational work has always seemed to create more possibilities, not less. Accordion Meg, whom I’m sure will never read this, dared me to question my own assumptions and inspired me with the courage she showed in following her own weirdness.
I’m sure others have suggested this. I’m indebted to a few folks who have showed me this without so much jibber-jabber, especially Meg, who lives on the side of a lovely mountain and doesn’t have an email address, but who played beautiful tunes just a bit longer than I did. She also blew my mind when she told me one day that she had “enough” melodies and wasn’t currently interested in learning any new ones. Contrast with current klezmer discourse on social media that is almost totally focused on melody. What would it mean to “have enough”?
Practical hint: I find the counterintuitive move of playing less is useful at times like these. People who are totally blocked are encouraged to stop playing altogether and let others carry it until they can figure it out. I’ve also added other suggestions for this sort of musical conviviality throughout this sub.
My mentor Haayim Yunk’l used to distinguish between ecstasies of exhalation and inhalation. Klezmer often falling into the latter category. “What’s emanating from your throat should sound unpolished, marked by cracking and what linguists call ingressive phonation, or vocalizing as you suck in breath” - How to Lament (see post, forthcoming)
The social is not the only modality of resistance: at times the solitary is even more effective, "dropping out " as we used to say. And mediated expression (like recorded music) freely shared online eliminates capitalist control and being coopted. . Our mentor Hakim Bey discounted these options. I'm not sure he was right.
You're right about Klezmer being tied to the social: the alienated solitary artist is a late arrival on the Jewish cultural scene, first appearing with the Di Yunge poets, in a radical break with the tradition of Yiddish press. And music needs an audience to fully unfold itself in ways writing does not.