Re: Jewish and Gypsy doinas

[Solidarity Foundation <svzandt...>]

On Mon, 06 Sep 1999 10:20:13 +0100
Joshua Horowitz wrote:

But by this time (post-war), Jews were no longer an integral part of the
musical landscape of Romania. The recordings of the early Jewish doinas
and the Romanian ones are simply harmonized, by virtue of the fact that
they were committed to disc before the music was infiltrated by
communist disciplined taste (-lessness).
Here's a synopsis of what a historically hypothetical response would
have been to the different harmonizations of the Doina:

Question: What do you think of the I-diminished chord and V chord
harmonization of the doina?

PRE-WAR:
JEW: Sounds very modern to me
GYPSY:Sounds very modern to me

BEGINNING OF COMMUNIST ERA MUSICAL IDEOLOGY:
JEW: Sounds very official to me
GYPSY: Sounds very offical to me

FROM ABOUT THE LAST 40 YEARS:
JEW:Sounds pretty Gypsy to me
GYPSY: Sounds pretty normal to me
  
Question: What do you think of the bare-bones harmonization of the
doina, without dimished and dominant chords?

PRE-WAR:
JEW: Sounds pretty normal to me
GYPSY:Sounds pretty normal to me

BEGINNING OF COMMUNIST ERA MUSICAL IDEOLOGY:
JEW: Sounds pretty Jewish to me
GYPSY: Sounds pretty old-fashioned to me

FROM ABOUT THE LAST 40 YEARS:
JEW:Sounds pretty old fashioned to me
GYPSY: Sounds pretty Jewish to me

Possible moral of story: History changes with our tastes. Josh Horowitz

_________

Without vouching for the accuracy of the above -- I don't know enough
about it to say -- I would like to add a codicil, since your last
installment, "the last 40 years," is pretty broad.

This summer I co-taught in a klezmer workshop organized by Hankus
Netsky, in which one of the master artists was Yosif Kagansky, a
Jewish accordion player from Kishinev, Moldova, who is in his late
40s. Until he left Moldova, approximately 10 years ago, Kagansky
played Jewish and non-Jewish weddings through a wide area of Moldova,
and has a broad knowledge of local ethnic styles. However, he is a
passionate advocate of the "real Jewish style" and deeply concerned
about its survival. Yet his concept of the real JEwish style is to
harmonize to the max. Thus, I don't see your hypothetical recent 
Gypsy as saying "sounds pretty Jewish to me," but rather, like the
Jew, I think he would also say, "pretty old fashioned."

My harmonizations on _sekund_ (violin playing chords and rhythms) must
have sounded to him positively neolithic, though he was too polite to
say so.

Itsik Leyb Volokh (Jeffrey Wollock)

P.S. - I don't know why you blame it on the Communists. I think it
is basically the quest for Progress and Modernity. Seems to me, if I
rightly recall, that's been a bit of an imperative here in the West,
too. Matter of fact, come to think of it, maybe it still is.
But anyway, isn't there an analogous development of introducing more
and more chromatic and jazz/impressionist harmonies into klezmer
practice in the 1940s and 50s. The most famous recorded example may
be the "Tantz!" album of the (late?) 50s, but you would have heard
it from the accordion in almost any wedding and bar mitsvah band of
the late 40s or 50s. Although I don't know that this was foremost in
the musicians' minds, I do seem to remember that in those Cold War
days the United States and the Soviet Union were in a continuous
rivalry to try to prove which one was the more modern, Socialism or
Capitalism . . .

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