Re: Klezmer Music (influences chart)

[Hope Ehn Dennis Ehn <ehn...>]

You're right, of course, about influences flowing back toward Europe. But
that was, unfortunately, of short duration, coming to an end in the 1940s
along with the entire European Klezmer tradition, their audiences, and the
rest of the Jewish communities there. There are still small Jewish
communities in Europe, but they're much more assimilated than was true
during the 1930s. (The French community has grown to be a very large one,
but the newer arrivals are Sephardim from North Africa -- their cultural
tradition is not the Yiddish one, and their music is not Klezmer.)

There are some European Klezmer groups, but I don't know whether any of
them have real roots in pre-WW2 Yiddish culture.

At what point does one stop talking about separate streams? Technology
*must* have something to do with it. Whereas the earlier influence came
from Europe to the U.S. with the physical arrival of European Klezmer
musicians, the "influence" of the 20's and 30's was mediated by technology
-- first recordings, then movies, and finally radio. I suspect that, if
there had been no Holocaust, there would be little difference today
between European and American Klezmer music, just as Israeli rock music
isn't really generically different from American rock.

I have read complaints that this technology is very frustrating to
ethnomusicologists. In some areas, there doesn't seem to be much "pure"
folk music any more, because everyone has heard other sorts of music on
the radio. I'm *not* an ethnomusicologist or a rock-music critic, so
anyone who knows more about this than I do may disagree with my statements
about ethnomusicology and rock music, but please don't melt down my poor
little laptop with "flames."

Hope Ehn                     <ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>

******************************************************************************
Dennis and Hope Ehn are 2 different people sharing one account.
Hope is the author of "On-Line Resources for Classical & Academic Musicians."
Dennis does programming (mostly C++).
PLEASE don't get us confused!                                 :-)
<ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>
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On Thu, 22 Dec 1994, Charles H Berg wrote:

> Great Diagram.  One minor note...the chart does not show the
> subsequent influence of "American klezmer" back on the "European"
> variety.  "Ameriskaya", a version of "Lena, Queen of Palestine" comes
> to mind as an example of such.  There were others.

> --
>       Charlie Berg
>       chb (at) world(dot)std(dot)com