As musicians, here's a few things we can steal directly from the language of lament.
Ornament1
We kicked off this essay with Joel Rubin’s observation that "virtually all of the terms associated with emotional aspects of the music and, in particular, with ornamentation are expressions of a sad or lamenting quality." And yet, even though “virtually all” of the ornaments are “sad,” the songs aren’t. How can this be? The answer to this riddle can be found in the nature of the female lament as we found it in medieval Spain.
As you recall, during our examination of the lament, "Jewish women were the main lament leaders in medieval Spain." (Sautter) Jewish women were leaders of wailing not just for Jews but for the Christian folks as well. Why? Because other faiths, like Christianity, discouraged their own from lamenting based on their positive view of the afterlife. Too much lamenting implied a lack of faith.
To make this explicit, Johannes Quasten goes back much earlier in history and makes an interesting comparison between the two headstones of girls who died young. The pagan one reads, “I raise my hands against God, who has taken me away in my innocence.”2 In contrast, the Christian one reads, “Do not beat your breasts, O father and mother.” Quasten concludes, “This [latter] point of view introduced a complete transformation of the mourning ceremonies.”
But wailing survived, and even though Christians were strongly dissuaded from the practice, Jews were allowed to wail at funerals. This next part is important:
They wailed not because they liked being sad or even because of the diaspora, but out of a passionate and uniquely Jewish love for this world and this life. Not burdened with the Christian faith in an happy-all-the-time afterlife, they were free to express their natural grief. This mixture of sensuality, sadness and love approached the emotional complexity Baldwin identified in the African-American tradition:
In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them.
This emotional combination also points to an alternative beyond the therapeutic, as we don’t ever wish to be cured of this love, nor do we fear it.
This sentiment is stronger in the female lament tradition, where it is spontaneous and direct, than the male lament tradition, which tends to add on layers of texts and interpretation, such as the allegory of King David and the Sheep in the case of the doina or esoteric readings of the lament’s power to affect the union of God with the Shekhinah in the case of the diaspora.3
Timbre and Phrasing
As I’ve demonstrated in too many previous posts, timbre and phrasing, often underappreciated in favor of melody and ornament, rise in importance and come into focus when seen through the lens of gesture and lament.
Doinas and the Wilderness
The disappearance of the doina is roughly equivalent to that of the badkhn and the lament mentioned in older texts that we saw earlier. In other cultures, the doina’s association with pagan lament is quite conscious, as in the case of certain Romanian doina genres and the Greek/Albanian mirologoi. In the Jewish doina (and other min/min/major tune progressions), this association is rationalized (appropriated?) by a religious allegory of King David and the lost sheep.4 This is no doubt "true," in the sense that musicians and audiences at the time understood it that way, but it doesn't exhaust the poetic potential of the form.
Speaking of poetry, the voices of the wailing women, descended from Jepthath’s daughter wailing in the mountains as well as the Judeo-Spanish women in the caves of Sacromonte, can now be heard amongst the yodels of the pastoralists and the bandit songs of the anarchic primitive rebels, in our half-real, half-imagined Wilderness, where we find not simply the traditional, but the repressed.
Parallelism, Tumbling Strains and The Andalusian Cadence
Hence to a great extent, lament poetry utilizes a series of contrasts which pit against each other units of time, living world and antiworld, mourner and dead, various configurations of human relationships such as woman to woman, adult to child, old to young, and individual to the cosmos.… it is the movement back and forth, from one destination to its opposite that dictates, in part, the structure of lament poetry. Bridge between Worlds: The Greek Women's Lament as Communicative Event, Anna Caravelli-Chaves
This kind of pairing is practically identical to literary parallelism, which is widespread in the Old Testament, Biblical laments and in laments generally. For English speakers, the most popular form of this is commonly found in blues; “When a women gets the blues, she hangs her head and cries, when a man gets the blues, he hops a train and rides…” etc.5 We can see this dynamic transferred into instrumental music in the structure of klezmer tunes that have a “on one hand.. but on the other…”6 dynamic. Often, these are then followed by a tumbling strain.
The tumbling strain that follows these "on one hand" pairs is identified by Curt Sachs as perhaps the oldest form of music (who really knows) and is also associated with lament.7
The most fascinating of the oldest melody patterns may be described as a 'tumbling strain. ' Its character is wild and violent: after a leap up to the highest available note in screaming fortissimo, the voice rattles down by jumps or steps or glides to a pianissimo respite on a couple of the lowest, almost inaudible notes; then, in a mighty leap, it resumes the highest note to repeat this cascade as often as necessary. In their most emotional and least 'melodious' form, such strains recall nearly inhuman, savage shouts of joy or wails of rage and may derive from such unbridled outbursts. Curt Sachs Wellsprings of Music
We’re in pretty squirrelly territory here, doesn’t most music go up and then down? Yes, but the dramatic rise and slower fall of the tumbling strain, while perhaps common to humanity in general, gets more attention in some music than others. Brandwein especially seemed to relish them (see example below). In America, Alan Jabbour, old time fiddling expert, noticed the tumbling strain or "cascading" or "descending tune" in American fiddling as distinct from its European forebears. He conjectures that it is likely a forgotten or repressed Native American influence.8 I think we can consider the strain in klezmer in a similar fashion- a subtle signifier that to my ears, sounds more raw than anything in cantorial traditions (would be interested to hear from others on this).
Cousin to the tumbling strain is the odd case of the Andalusian Cadence, a descending bass pattern in many kinds of music that is also associated with lament (see also Descending Tetrachord: Emblem of Lament). The pattern usually starts on the iv chord and descends to the I. Identifying chords in this way is a little problematic in this context, esp when this is used not as a cadence but as an ostinato repeating pattern. Used this way, it creates ambiguity as to what is the tonic and can lend itself to a more modal approach. This repeating bass pattern encourages improvisation (indeed it revolutionized music in the classical western context in this way, see chapter 2 of linked book). Such improvisation is an important aspect of lament as we’ve seen before and will elaborate below.
Examples of tumbling strains, Andalusian cadences and their association with lament are endless, here is just one, picked arbitrarily.
Smuggling
Even more interesting, as in the Native American example above, the lament can be a place where cultures overlap meaningfully. For example:
This is one of the more modern tune genres in klezmer. The melodic motifs, including Brandwein's elaborate tumbling strains, are possibly borrowed, not from cantorial tradition or even from Jewish laments, but from co-territorial neighbors. All of these cultures would be able to "talk to each other" via the language of lament, which forms a kind of a common denominator, or underground currency, in this region.9 The overlapping laments are specifically the female pagan ones, which, being unaffiliated, travel more easily across borders.
Spontaneity
What is remarkable about a performance such as the wept lament Feld recorded, is that it occurs spontaneously, yet is admired for its careful crafting. Dangerous Voices (Gail H-W)
Of course, you find the exact same combination of spontaneity and craft in klezmer. To some extent, this is an attribute of all oral culture, which relies on a huge stock of aphorisms and cliches to continually orient itself. You hear the same thing in old-timey Yiddish conversation patter. It’s easygoing charm is only counteracted by our complete inability to replicate it as hyper-literate people.
The sort of spontaneity we’re talking about isn’t free jazz, but rather the creative reworking of cliches sprinkled with occasional completely novel ideas. This emphasis on spontaneity is something klezmer and the female lament share perhaps distinct from the male traditions, which tend to stress authority more strongly. The differences are subtle, but see comparisons between klezmer and niggunim as an example.
The Historically-Informed Imagination
While you’re listening to Naftule, imagine the woodblock in the same tradition as flamenco clapping/castanets/foot stomping10 or the ancient Egyptian/Israelite clappers, all of which were played by and specifically associated with women and mourning traditions. These traits, together with those discussed above, have connections to the specifically female lament and yet would be inaudible to us if the tune was considered only from the viewpoint of the diasporic religious lament.
Indirectness
It would be a mistake to consider all of klezmer to be reducible to the lament, just as it would be a mistake to make an entire performance one long self-conscious lament. The lament is there, but it squirms under too much sharp focus.11 Just as the women in a wailing circle return to their knitting, eating and small talk in between laments, life goes on. Sometimes, the best way to maintain that emotional gravitylessness is to avoid talking about it.12
Conclusion
Obviously, even a smaller genre like klezmer is sprawling and diverse, covering several continents and hundreds of years. No one thing can explain it. However, I hope I’ve shown that it is possible to see the female lament as an important and ignored strain of the music, and this does have the potential to dramatically change the way we hear, play and interact with it. Further work might benefit from (1) continuing to approach klezmer in terms of the non-”religious”/non-”secular” female lament, (2) repairing the broken musician/audience dynamic via lament-based gestures/dance/vocal interjections, etc. and (3) letting the lament’s own strange emotional power led us beyond our modern therapeutic frameworks.
I’d like to dedicate this particular series to Jefferson Holt and Claudia Raab. Your tears have opened my heart and ripped me to pieces. Thank you both.
For more on ornament see Ornament and Crime
Prohibitions against music often cite its frivolous or licentious nature. But this angry rebellion against God shows another way it can lead to heresy. The injustice expressed in the female lament should be considered as another clue to the nexus between music and heresy in Jewish history. Again, consider how the predecesors of the klezmer, the letsim, were not just understand as clowns (frivolous) but also nihilisitic independent intellectuals.
Obviously people can disagree on this. But the recuperation of this feeling by religious authorities always strikes me as an afterthought, and remains somewhat two dimensional in comparison.
Josh Horowitz has made this point convincingly.
See Paul Oliver’s Twixt Midnight and Day: Binarism, Blues and Black Culture
I believe I first learned about this in one of Josh Horowitz’s classes, but he points out it is a widely used motif in different kinds of music.
See also Modern Laments in Northwestern Greece, Their Importance in Social and Musical Life and the “Making” of Oral Tradition for a more rigorous musicological analysis that incorporates tumbling strains and also looks at the relationships between the vocal lament and the instrumental lament in Greek culture.
‘Cascading Tunes : On the Descending Contour in Appalachian Fiddle Tunes ', paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society , 16–20 October 2002
For a literary example see Chekhov’s Rothschild Fiddle.
“The use of hand clapping and feet stamping in sorrow appears to directly related to the funeral practices [of the Juedo-Spanish female wailers].” Sautter, Miriam Tradition
This may also be why there was no old country taxonomy of ornaments. Old stories of blues and jazz mentorship also stress this indirect style of teaching.
The lament’s elusiveness is something it shares with other hard-to-define notions like duende, saudade or kefi. As Baldwin says: “Only people who have been “down the line”… know what this music is about….” See also Benjamin and Scholem on the lament as living on the border between speech and silence.