There is No Klezmer Guitar, Part 5
Tsvei Strunes, the Pastoral Drone and the Benefits of Bad Music
This one’s long and a little twisty.
There are a handful of pictures of pre-war European klezmer musicians but only one picture I know of that has the word "klezmer" on it. This one:
This is from the Idishe Gasn in Vilne (Jewish street) by Moses Vorobeichic, published in 1931.
Let's take a closer look at what he's doing.
If you notice, the violin strings don't look like a normal fiddle. Instead they are set up in two pairs of two strings each, with a big space in the middle. This is the so-called "tsvey strunes" (two strings) tuning. You can hear an example of it here. And it has a story to tell.
Connection between Tsvei Strunes, Bagpipes and the Pastoral in Jewish Music
Where does the tsvey strunes come from? Well, like we saw with the doina, it’s confusing because there are two possible sources with strong claims: the Eastern European rural countryside or the cosmopolitan Turkish court.
Let's start with the countryside:
"A tiny surviving repertoire of dances comes from the opposite cultural pole of the Eastern Ashkenazim: the music of Balkan shepherds. Though it is likely that the immediate source of this musical style came through Romanian-speaking shepherds, the few surviving tunes are unlike any of the large Moldavian dance repertoire and seem more like a generalized impression of Romanian/ Moldavian cimpoi bagpipe music, quite possibly with southern Balkan pastoral influences. In two of the surviving examples (both incidentally recorded in New York), the violinists use the tsvei strunes tuning, a scordatura involving lowering the A string to create an octave with the e string." Zev Feldman, Klezmer,
Here Zev clearly states the connection between this tuning, shepherds and the bagpipe. In addition, Henry Sapoznik, in his discussion of another prominent example of tsvey strunes, Abe Schwartz's National Hora, says that the tsvey strunes produces a "rich bagpipe-like effect." In that tune, you can hear the “audience member” ask for a tune in “tsvey strun-es” in the beginning of the recording.
Tsvey strunes—> bagpipes→ shepherds. Done.
Now let's look at the Ottoman connection: Here's an example of tsvey strunes in a song called the "Terkisher Gebet"(Turkish Prayer) by Leon Schwartz. Zev, in his klezmer book, also defines tsvey strunes as "a flowing klezmer rhythm genre in scordatura... in the manner of the turkish keman." He also states:
"Within wedding music, terkisher freylekhs or terkisher dobriden (in the North sometimes called Der Frank = The Sephardi) combined Jewish melodies with the rhythmic structure of the Greek dance balos or syrtos. Rubato violin melodies known as tsvey strunes (two strings) employed a Turkish violin tuning with a doubled E string. Sometimes these tunes were known as terkisher gebet (Turkish prayer.)" - Zev p. 211.
In the language of klezmer, “terkisher” doesn’t necessarily mean Turkish or Ottoman. It can mean anything roughly to the South or Mediterranean. However, Zev specifically invokes the Turkish here.
Conclusion: So which was it? It was, of course, both. Tsvey strunes, like its cousin, the doina (also in a flowing rhythm), is a good example of how music can poetically syncretize disparate influences (see bottom of article for more on Sephardic/Ottoman roots of Tsvey Strunes). However, if we look closer at the rural associations we find important distinctions there that have been obscured with time.
.Tsvey Strunes, the Bagpipe and the Guitar
If we peel back the shepherd/pastoral roots we bump straight away into the instrument Sapoznik mentioned: the bagpipe. The connection of tsvey strunes to the bagpipe is made in two musicological ways: the drone and the dissonant pair of strings made possible with scordatura (retuning, literally "discord.")
Before we get into that connection, you have to remember that klezmer is not an eternal category that goes back to ancient times. It's a term that emerges in popular usage in the 17th century. To understand the importance of the bagpipe, you have to take yourself back to that important time period. It’s a period of cultural shift that is happening on many levels- Jews are moving from Middle Europe (Ashkenaz I as its called in scholarly Jewish circles) to Eastern (Ashkenaz II), and from a musical point of view, as I'll show, from pre-professional minstrel types to the professional klezmer and finally, there is a shift from bagpipe-y sounds to violin.
Before that shift, you had a bunch of randos running around that went by a variety of names: spielutte, bierfiddlers, letsonim, marshaliks. They played music but they were also entertainers, clowns, speechifiers, storytellers. Let's take a look at this salty bunch:
These spielutte, or bierfiddlers, while ignorant of music as theory or notation, were masters of the local violin tunings (scordatura)..." Feldman, pg. 80 (Salmen as source I believe).
We find an important association here between alternate tunings and musical illiteracy. We saw the same thing way back in our first post on this topic when Segovia disparaged the lowly open-tuned guitar player and his trivial fingerpicked motifs. We will not be surprised then to see that we find the same interest in scordatura and open tunings in Jewish guitar during this time:
"One of the oldest preserved Jewish dances can be found in Heckel's Lautenbuch (1562). It was a simple dance, known as Judentanz, written for lute accompanied by either a drone bass or a dudelzack." (from Strom's Shpil)
Let's listen to the Heckel Judentanz.
Pay attention to the thumb. It plays one note throughout the piece. This is a drone. The guitar is also in scordatura. So what?! The importance of these alternate tunings is that, like tsvey strunes and the bagpipe pieces, they lend themselves to drone accompaniment.
The given songs [klezmer songs in altered dorian mode] are often accompanied by a drone or an ostinato bass, consisting of tonic and dominant; it is not performed, but implied. The drone, realized or implied, makes one think that these melodies were performed or accompanied at some time by instruments with a continuous bass sound, like the bagpipe, or the Ukrainian lira [a hurdy-gurdy—M.S.]. - Beregovsky
(This is the exact same dynamic that African American guitarists who relied on the "bourdon" or drone discovered when adapting the guitar to their tastes. Compare the Judentanz drone to Robert Belfour's Hill Country Stomp.)
In the case of the Heckel tune, the drone is explicit, and, as if the guitar drone wasn’t enough to get the point acriss, the sheet music even calls for the bagpipe specifically.
There's another guitar tune from this time. Neusidler's Judentanz. It is also in a drone friendly tuning and calls for a crunchy drone.1
That fiddles and guitars would be cranking out droney music in this pre-klezmer time is not surprising. Monophony was all the rage all over Europe. It was, after all, a time of ecstatic dance and a bright spot for kickass particpatory music.
Aside: Did Jews play the bagpipe?
The only other information about this that I can find comes from Yale Strom’s Shpil which is derived, I have to assume, from Walter Salmen’s work on Jewish culture in Germany. Salmen simply says “Yep, they played bagpipe” but sadly there is not more detail. However, klezmer music has bagpipe-like melodic figures as late as 1912, when Belf’s Moldavanskai͡a dudochka was recorded. Dudochka, (translated as shepherd’s flute, but also linguistically similar to words for bagpipe like dudu or duda) has a series of repeating hiccups that conjure, amongst other things, bagpipes.
Bagpipes, Drones and Magic
Ok, so bagpipes! So what?!
These days, we tend to consider one chord drone-heavy songs as basic. But drones are not merely for dumb people who haven't figured out chords yet. Even at the time of the transition to more complex harmonies, there were objections to seeing this move as “progress” (see Vincenzo Galilei on monophony) and multiple cases of intentional “regression.” Drones may be simple, but they can do things that other kinds of music can’t.
To prove this we could use lots of examples, but for fun let's look at it in the Jewish context. Curt Sachs describes some funky scenes happening during the era of the 2nd temple. There, he says, a musical pipe was used in the temple. He thinks this is a double oboe, similar in timbre to a bagpipe, but not technically a bagpipe. Whatever it was, it was almost always played with two pipes (“tsvey pipes”, as it were). There is a mention in a text that two pipes were noted at the time to be less "pleasant" than one pipe. Why?
Perhaps they were played in unisono, thus causing unpleasant pulsations when not tuned or blown with perfect exactness; or they played different parts, possibly even probably in the manner of a drone, as was customary in Ancient civilizations.
Sachs goes on...
The description of Jewish pipe blowing would not be complete without mentioning its power to induce a state of trance. The apocryphal acts of the Apostles relates that one day a Jewess played the pipes behind St. Thomas for an hour before he got into an ecstasy and none could understand the words he then spoke except the piper.
Note the connection between women, music and ecstasy. This connection is crucial to understanding why there is no klezmer guitar as we’ll see throughout this series.2 This scenario is not that far fetched or exotic as it may seem. Consider the zurna/davul bands that are still very active today in Southern Europe, they play similar instruments and also still have the habit of playing directly into people’s heads, in a manner probably identical to our musician Jewess above, and to ecstatic and even medicinal effect.
This style of playing can sound primitive because it tends to not be melodically fancy, but that is precisely the point and why the bagpipe and tsvey strunes have so much to tell us. They operate under completely different criteria for what is important and not important in music. The musical powers of pipers extend beyond trance, into medicine and magic. In an absolutely fascinating and weird article about the magical powers of piper-bards in Eastern Europe, Zbigniew Jerzy Przerembski, bagpipe genius, holds forth on this topic:
"When writing of the ‘Slavic guślarze’ of old, Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki was referring to musicians who played the bagpipes (dudy), kobza, bandura or hurdy-gurdy (lira korbowa), traversing the extensive lands of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. In a still Romantic spirit, he emphasized that it was to them that ‘we owe the safeguarding of the oldest and most beautiful poetry’, as ‘they were true apostles, who went from village to village, from manor to town, teaching songs and music’. It should be remembered, however, that those itinerant singers and muzykanci, often belonging to the caste of ‘dziady’, were ascribed supernatural abilities… These extraordinary figures knew a lot about the world, taught and moralized, knew events past and present and legends. They sometimes even executed a variety of overt or covert (e.g. intelligence or political) missions. They were also regarded as people acquainted with holy things, ‘effective’ prayers and magic spells, able to cure and to prepare healing concoctions (chiefly from herbs)." Przerembski, Muzikants as a Product and Force of Nature
He goes on to mention that they could even control the weather too3 You might be tempted to reject this as “out there,” but, while the claim to control weather is obviously loony, the history of rough music and magic’s mutual association is not. In Judaism we have one example- during Purim, whenever Haman’s name is mentioned, the kids all go wild on the grogger in an attempt at something between superstition and magic. There is also the example of the shofar, obviously a freaky early form of non-music that can be compared to other temple instruments, like rattles, priestly bells and gongs. These all exist in a timbral, not melodic, aural world with spiritual connections. This is a perfect example of what Przerembski (and others) refer to as “non-music” which is often used to repel evil spirits. Banging on pots is another popular example of this that has endured.
We see this over and over. Chris King wrote about the ideas that Epirotic drone musicians have about the healing properties of their music. The Death and Resurrection Show is a fun look at how musicians from all over can be understood as descendants of an earlier shamanic class. An important part of their performances was a demonstration of their supernatural powers. This devolved into a wide range of "tricks," which ranged from the serious to the downright silly and may explain why many of the proto-klezmer Jewish Musicians in Middle Europe were also considered clowns ("lets") or pranksters. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
It wasn’t about the notes, or impressing people with melodic sophistication or fancy chords.
An important caveat: These sort of pagan/shamanic traces one finds in gentile communities are probably much rarer in Jewish ones, who had been stomping them out for centuries by now. There may be important exceptions in the margins of Jewish society (see my series on lament and women’s traditions), but more research is needed and caution should be used before grafting Slavic bardic traditions onto their Jewish neighbors, of course.
Conclusion #2: The drone, associated with the bagpipe (which was then mimicked by alternatively tuned fiddles and guitars), was linked with an entirely different view of music, one which incorporated various aspects of the supernatural or magical.
The Transition from Bagpipe to Violin: Professionalism and the Loss of the Drone
So what happened to that approach to music?
As we mentioned at the beginning, this story is taking place at the dawn of klezmer. There is an important shift happening at this time. In both Jewish music and Slavic music, we can trace this shift in the role of the musician by tracing how their titles changed. In the Jewish realm, the professional term "klezmer" appears, slowly edging out the various bierfiddlers, letsonim, marshaliks, etc. and in the Slavic realm, the same linguistic shift happens.4
The Jewish shift is tricky. Zev points out that, in the move from Ashkenaz I to Ashkenaz II, there wasn't much carried over culturally. How drastic was this rupture? See Joel Rubin's quote above (pending permission) for info on possible overlap of bagpipe into Eastern Europe, but the "Judentanz" guitar pieces we saw from Germany would not cross over, and we would not find that sort of thing documented in Eastern Europe, although we know that, at least, a lute was represented in the klezmer guild in 17th century Lvov before disappearing entirely from klezmer music.
The transition from freaky randos to klezmer musicians and their professional guild system represented a change both in status and function. The musician was now... a musician as we understand the term today, and no longer expected to play the role of a jester or clown. That old pre-modern figure would now be split into two: the klezmer and the badkhn.
There was a broad middle group between the extremes of guild educated musicians and the archaic, folklorist spielman. In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries the term spielman gave way to the appelative musikant." (Salmen discussing German Jewish music)
As we see, in Zev's quote, this shift often coincided with literacy, as it did in the Ukrainian/Slavic context:
"The term muzykant [pi. muzykanci, tr.] is understood as defining an instrument player belonging to the traditional current of unwritten musical culture disseminated through direct transmission, the last representatives of which were, and partly remain today, folk musicians."
Conclusion 3: Starting slowly somewhere around the 17th century several shifts happened. (1) Musicians were becoming more literate and forming into a formal professional class (2) The extra-musical magical functions were becoming untangled from the music as (3) Monophony was slowly giving way to more complexity. (4) As a possible result of #1 and #3, open-tunings, which were well documented before this shift in both guitar and fiddle music, were becoming scarcer, possibly contributing to #2.
The "Bad" Musician
What became of the earlier strain of pre-modern music? Did it die out completely?
As the years cranked on, the bagpipes and the klezmers would eventually share one interesting association in common:
From the Polish noun duda, meaning "bagpipes" or "bad musician," the common Polish surname Duda is most likely an occupational surname for one who played the bagpipes or, possibly, one who played them badly." from some website
My mom said, "Ugh you play like a klezmer" Personal interview around 2007 Philadelphia
The term klezmer, which originally was used as a prestigous and professional term slowly degraded. By the 20th century, klezmer was in decline. I don't think the street performer/beggar we saw in the photo above labelled "klezmer" enjoyed much status. Max Epstein, when asked if he was a klezmer, rejected the term and said klezmers were "the lowest of the low." The Epsteins declared themselves, in opposition, muzykants (used here in its Yiddish not Polish context, with slightly different connotations- confusing).
There has been much arguing about whether or not the term "klezmer" is derogatory. It seems obvious that at different times, it meant different things. Max Epstein threatening to punch you in the nose for calling him a klezmer settles that question for me.
The more interesting question is, “So what?”
Take the example of the bagpiper. When judged solely by our current standards for music, those old bagpipe players were just illiterate, itinerant musician playing a limited (drone) instrument that frequently went out of tune. But that view unfairly uses our current bias. They weren't just musicians- they were bards, magicians, healers, shamans, danceleaders and storytellers. And the tools they had were adapted to those functions. Jewish musicians in particular, were cited for playing out of time and out of tune.
Monophony, as we saw, can be very powerful, as can the dissonances of being out of time and out of tune. But when judged by contemporary bourgeois standards, that style simply can’t compete with the more "complex" and therefore “better” fancy harmonies. But this criteria is biased. You try blowing St. Thomas' mind with polite chord changes.
Consider how in America, African American traditions from blues to jazz to funk to rap, were constantly dismissed as bad or even not-music by the dominant middle class society. In America, that music is only documented because the white-owned record companies knew enough to know that they had no idea what would sell, and decided to record practically anyone who could get through a song standing up. Imagine the history of American music if we didn’t have the recordings of Bukka White (who was a hobo) or Blind Willie McTell (blind street singer) not to mention dozens of others.
In Jewish Eastern Europe, that documentation didn't happen. Over and over in European history, we have examples of Gentiles saying that Jews played badly, mentioning being out of tune, bad rhythm, shrill notes, excessive ornamentation. And yet, just like with the African American examples, we see these musicians were in demand and popular nonetheless (Gentiles often complained Jewish musicians were taking their jobs). But unlike their African American counterparts, we don't have recordings or much documentation of these "bad" Jewish musicians.5
We do have one.
Here is a musician who was illiterate, played in a wilder and more dissonant style, and engaged in lots of unprofessional behavior. Naftule Brandwein. And his music contained something that many people find irresistible and utterly lacking from his professional contemporaries.
My idol was Dave Tarras, but he played like a cold fish. Technique, fine. Played beautifully, but the fellow who played with fire was Naftule Brandwein. He would take the heart out of you (Epstein 1991, interview).
Tarras was technical, you know, he played very accurate, but when you listened to Naftule, your feet would move ... there was a difference between the two ....Tarras was wonderful, beautiful playing, but when Naftule played, it was more hot, more fire." (S. Beckerman 1996,interview)
Danny Rubinstein, who knew Tarras well and had heard Brandwein perforrm on several occasions, attributes the differences between the two performers to their having been based on a discrepancy in technical ability, stating that Brandwein "wasn't a great technician, but he had a feel. Dave [Tarras] took that feel with an expertise in technicality that raised the level of klezmer playing" (Danny Rubinstein 1994, (interview).
All quotes taken from Joel Rubin’s Art of Klezmer Improvisation and Ornamentation
Conclusion #4: The pre-modern approach to music may have survived in “bad” music, which is strangely popular and moving.
The Home Stretch: Guitars?
The drone-heavy Jewish open-tuned guitar now becomes “bad” and goes into hiding. As we saw in Lvov, "the lute.. disappears from Jewish music entirely after the seventeenth century…" (Polin, Studies in Polish Jewry) But, as we’ll see later, the same social unrest that pushed Jews eastward, would also carry those open-tuned guitars east into Russia, where they would emerge at the end of the 18th century, specifically in the context of non-professional, homegrown and female music.
Just as a demonstration of this one chord/mulitple chord business. Here’s a tune known for some catchy harmonic parts that I stripped down to one chord (ok I add a 5 chord at the very end but you get the idea). You can do this with many tunes and it will, I argue, add to the groove and free the tune up in important ways.
Next: We are in the home stretch people! Back to 20th century, 78s, greeks and cartoons!
Appendix 1: Tsvey Strunes Marginalia
Note: I’m not drawing any connections or parallels, just plopping this here.
"Morteza Neidavoud was born to a Jewish family in Tehran in 1900..." see: https://sephardiclosangeles.org/portfolios/the-bird-of-dawn/ (compare strings with Vilne) The instrument is open-tuned in the sense that it's a I-V-I situation, like a small greek baglama.
Delacroix 1842, Jewish Musician from Mogador (Morocco): Compare bow and strings with Vilne
Jewish Musicians from Dagestan
Appendix 2:
"We know little about the extra-musical functions of Polish dudziarze (bagpipers), whose practices date back to the Middle Ages. They are most likely to have discharged such functions, as would appear to be indicated by the broader semantic field of the term ‘dudziarze’ (and related terms). Still today, each member of the traditional two-man bagpipe-violin bands in the Silesian Beskid Mountains is called gajdosz, the Silesian word for dudziarz (bagpiper). This includes the violinist, whom old highlanders also refer to as muzykant (unless he is playing with the bagpiper). This sort of distinction had a wider scope. Into the first decades of the twentieth century, it perdured in eastern Slavic lands, particularly in Hutsulshchyna or indeed in Ukraine in general, where, according to Klyment Kvitka, the word muzyka referred, among other things, to violin playing (solo or in a band) and to the violinist himself. It did not cover, meanwhile, muzykanci* and music performed on the bagpipes, kobza, hurdy-gurdy, end-blown flutes or trombita. In spite of this, only the kobza and hurdy-gurdy players, and to a certain extent also the dudziarze, were fully professional muzykanci in Ukraine. Paradoxically, this most probably had something to do with their extra musical functions."
Przerembski, Muzikants as a Product and Force of Nature
Poor Neuslider and his Judentanz. Much ado has been made about the weird tuning that was suggested for it, which makes no practical sense at all. Was this a joke about the discordant nature of Jewish music? There were even recordings made with the ridiculous tuning and big scholarly treatments about it. No, it turns out it was almost certainly a printing error. See M. Morrow's "Ayre on a F# String"]
Something I read about with some Sephardic (French?) medieval Jewish bard, but dang it, I've lost the reference!
Linguistically, it gets really confusing in the Slavic contet. The violin playing "muzyka" takes over from the illiterate "muzykanci." These terms don’t really make sense as differences, see Przerembski for more in Appendix 2. I admit, I’m stumped about the particularities over these very similar terms, but there is something going on with the name changes as he interprets them.
That is excitingly starting to change, see this album or these folks for a start.