Klezmer Themes

[Alex Jacobowitz <Alex_Jacobowitz...>]

B"H Munich

Friends, Jews, Lanzmen - lend me your ears.

Yes, perhaps we have indeed strayed from the "clarinet" question, but
perhaps
because there are yet bigger fires to extinguish.

The subject of klezmer in general is tied historically to the culture that
created it.
Until the eve of the second world war, Eastern European Jewry determined
music's 
place within its own religion/culture borders (or tradition, however you
choose to define it). 

In Hindemith's terms, we could easily call klezmer a form of
Gebrauchsmusik,
that is, a music with a clearly delineated function inside its society. It
was not "art" (root: artificial), 
nor was it ever intended to be. And just as Eastern European Jewry was
splintered by the 
Holocaust, so is our current concept of exactly what klezmer "was", or was
"intended" to be. 

So, if we are to stitch together patches of what klezmer "was", let's first
look at what Eastern
European Jewry was. From the 18th century, it was polarized between the
Lithuanian yeshivish 
mentality (halacha - intellect for its own sake) and Chassidish
(mystical-emotional within the confines 
of the intellect). Chassidism eventually won, but it took a long time.
Assimilation was a third
option primarily known to Western European Jewry, but for our purposes will
remain
peripheral to the discussion.

We ought to rediscover our conceptual roots as Jews before we pour
ourselves into "interpreting"
Jewish music. The questions, baldly put in Manichean terms, would be "how
much of my 
Jewish music will remain in the strictly legal realm - authenticity,
'tradition' - and how much of it will be
in the creative, emotive realm?"

The parallel evolutions of East European Judaism and its music
 - between the "Written Law" (musical notes) and "Oral Law" (music
recordings)
including the Commentaries (shmoozing) and pilpul (this clarinet
discussion), 
will inevitably create a new Masora (tradition) for the "talmidim"
(students) of neo-Klezmer.

However, the results can also be unfortunate, and devastatingly 
obvious to those who bring themselves closer to both Jewish tradition 
and music as a philosophical/religious science, in that Jewish *cultural 
assimilation and Jewish *musical assimilation will also have parallel 
evolutions, which we see often in the klezmer discussions posted here.

May I suggest that we focus on "Duties of the Heart" long before we become
entangled in questions of "sound"? For if we want our Jewish music to
reflect
our Jewish souls (do we not?), we simply must place the discussion of
Jewish 
ethics on a higher level than Greek esthetics. For if we don't, our music
must 
rapidly stagnate, no matter what today's market may indicate.

I come here to raise Klezmer, not to bury it.

B'ahava,

Alex Jacobowitz