Looking over the work from the past year, I realize it’s hard for someone new to this blog to figure out where to start. So:
This blog is a mix of individual and series-long posts that investigate klezmer, and other music traditions, as technologies of participation. When seen in this way, and not just as a foreign language whose surface-level dialects need to be mimicked in the name of continuity and identity, the history of the music comes into focus. It answers “why” the tradition is the way it is, and asks us to respond to that.
The best example might be the series How to Lament. Although klezmer scholar and musician Joel Rubin notices the overwhelming presence of the “lamenting quality” in klezmer music, very few historians of klezmer discuss the actual impact of funereal lament or discuss it outside the context of male-dominated religious prayer. Completely ignored is the entire tradition of the “wailing women,” or professional female mourners, who extended back to (or before) the origins of Judaism right into the 20th century. This post takes a look at the emotional framework and the mechanics of that lament, which is not what most people think it is, and how it affects the music.
Many folks new to klezmer try to find the essence of the music in its melodies or, when they realize the melodies were mostly “adapted” from neighbors, the ornaments. In the series called Pyramid to the Campfire (bad title), I take a long look at why current views on ornamentation tend to obscure some important historical disagreements about their role, even amongst older klezmorim. These disagreements crack open the music and lead to an underworld exploration about the history of phrasing, timbre, rhythm and even silence. Looked at this way, these murkier, often ignored musical elements become something like a grammar, that “connect up” in various ways to our political and social imaginations.
There is No Klezmer Guitar stems out of my own failed attempt to find any scrap of tradition related to, well, klezmer, played on guitars. Although guitars were very popular in parts of Eastern Europe, and even though Dave Tarras learned guitar before clarinet, the absence of a klezmer guitar tradition told me some interesting things about both klezmer and the guitar. Along the way we meet the fascinating history of the open-tuned guitar on both sides of the Atlantic and how it thrived in America but was stunted in the East. My conclusion (spoiler) is that the guitar was tainted and often seen as vaguely shameful (for various reasons I get into) and that its uses in the 19th and 20th century were not by musical elites or the volkish masses, but by distinctly modern creative freaks and marginal folks, like artists, women and amateurs, aka my people. [accompanying album forthcoming in fall].
A Yiddish Guide to Lawn Maintenance is actually not just a joke, but rather an attempt to show how Eastern European ideas of the courtyard created certain kinds of conviviality and social relationships which were lost somewhere over the Atlantic. This rupture causes confusion and alienation amongst it’s descendants and therefore, practical solutions are proposed and solicited in the name of “Psychic Courtyardism.”
Worrying the Strings: Anxiety and Traditional Music was a bit of a flop! I’ve been working on this dang thing for a decade now and still can’t quite wrangle it. The relationship between anxiety, alienation, melancholia, etc and instrumental music has been noted for a while (Ficino, Aristotle?) and is also something obvious to current practitioners, but how does it work exactly? And how can we better reclaim this role in the context of performance?
One theme that has surprised me by popping up over and over: The role of the Ancient Near East (also called “the Old High Culture” or“Oriental”) in klezmer and other traditional music. It’s predominantly modal, female and improvisatory character implies an entirely different approach to what we consider a song to be, and even though it is often lumped in with “traditional,” it stands out and in conflict with many other elements of traditional European music. It is actually all over the place in pop music, esp these days, and represents an interesting path forward.
Don’t sleep on the single posts either, some of those, like the ones on same-sex dancing or the lost art of the tanslieder are my personal favorites.
I got a list of future topics, on music and art (“Imagination Sucks: The History of Imagination for Kids”) and probably will post more, but as an exercise in world building, I think at some point, more posts can be counter-productive. We’ll see.
