Re: Jewish and Gypsy doinas

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

> 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."

There is an inherent problem in interviewing informants about historical
questions which do not involve their own career spans. Add to this the
problem of the  
eradification of historical details in the history books of the east
blocks. When talking to musicians who worked during the pre-war, war and
post war years, you may get accurate answers about the changes in music,
but even then you are not assured of it. And I'm afraid making
conclusions about musicological phenomenae in our field is next to
impossible because we only have a fraction of the data we need to meet a
statistic quota.  

My experience corroborates yours in its basics, Itzik, and I would
like to add to the hypothetical Gypsy the statement that "and it sounds
pretty provincial." But maybe we should stop with the hypothetical
quotes cuz I think they backfired on the point.

For several years I have been working with an accordionist/contrabassist
from Kishinev now living in Vienna, Isaak Loberan (please ask Yosif if
he knows him), Jewish, in his 40's, experienced in the wedding music of
Moldova, Jewish and otherwise. We give workshops together 2-3 times a
year, and its always a kick for me, mostly because our approaches and
results are so full of contradictions. Isaak always scores out his parts
in detail, fills, counterlines, bass lines, tenor lines and all, giving
each player his/her part and drilling them to the end, with filled out
harmonizations; The results are always musical, and I call them 
*Russky Narodnye* (Russian national) arrangements; On the other hand, I
always have my players sing the tune till they've got the melody
(Californsky Narodnya) then give different players their parts by
playing them to them (so the others can hear and play along as well),
then little by little give them ornaments and isolate melody fragments
and give them variant choices till they can imrovise a bit. The funny
thing is, the effect is not so different, except the harmonies are much
more static and you can hear that the energy is being derived by
different means. 

I recently gave a lecture to the Burgenland Croatians of Vienna, and
Isaak attended. I played a doina there and later asked him the loaded
question: Did it sound Jewish to him? He said, yes, except for the
chromatic line (fingered glissando) I played getting from Im to IVm. He
said, that's the Romanian way of playing it- Jews don't play chromatic
lines like that and its very specific to Romanian style. I told him that
I have lots of examples of 78's of Jews playing fingered glissandi and
he said they were playing Romanian style then. Now that's a high profile
line, that chromatic thing, but how the heck are you going to prove this
device is Jewish and this one's not? Do certain musical gestures have a
semiotic identity code, i.e. is there an inherent meaning in some
musical gestures which tells you this is Jewish or Greek or whatever?
And if there is, does it stay that way or do some cultures claim certain
characteristics as their own, only to leave them when they are no longer
relevant or wanted? Can we generalize at all about these things. I mean,
in my experience there are as many perceptions of one phenomenon as
there are people observing them, and these preceptions certainly do
change also. An Israeli Klezmer sax player heard my band in Vienna years
ago and laughed at it saying we knew nothing about Jewish style but did
a pretty good job imitating Romanian...

> 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 . . . 

There is always a retrogressive and progressive stream at any time
happening simultaneously in a culture, but as you observe, that
traditional (retrogressive) culture is not finding its way into peoples
living rooms via CD's as much as modernized ethnic culture now and there
are many reasons for this, which I want to illustrate with another
lengthy story:

Back in the late 80's, right before the so-called fall of the wall
(communist) I travelled through Poland with a Polish Photographer in
search of Jewish and other folk music. We ended up in eastern Poland on
the Ukrainian border because we had heard there was an informal meeting
of traditionalists gathering there. In the course of 3 days (we slept in
tents and on the floor of a defunct gradeschool there and ate brown
bread, pickles cheese and vodka) we met musicians mainly from the
Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland and Belorussia and I even taped a Vilna
Karaite girl singing Karaite folk songs (a rare event, as there are only
3000 in the former SSR and 300 in Vilna). On the first evening we sat
around a campfire in the nearby woods and I had my trusty Sony
professional walkman running, taping the west Ukrainian field songs
which were being sung non-stop when this Polish guy approached me and
interrogated me about what I was doing. Not wanting trouble, I turned
off my machine, because as it turns out, he was very upset that I, a
westerner, was taping the music. It's hard here to communicate how
frighteningly ideological his fears seemed to me then. I had thought
that this meeting was a beautiful example of people showing the power
and beauty of their ethnicity and saw this in light of the fact that
under the communists they only did this in private, and the time was at
hand where they wouldn't have to sneak off to the woods to do it any
more. But my perception was naive, because the next danger to
traditional culture which they saw lurking around the corner was the big
bad west, which wanted to take its traditional culture, package it up,
export it and sell it to capitalist commercial companies, thereby
changing its essence. In short, the fear of being punished by communist
ideology was being replaced by the fear of having their traditions once
more weakened by an outside force, this time commercially minded
westerners, which was embodied by my presence and by virtue of the fact
that I had a tape machine. To me this had the coloring of stealing the
soul by taking a picture. Yet I was able to convince my friend-to-be
that I meant nothing of the kind, but only after being given an
accordion to play on the next day and being joined by a Belorussian
bagpiper and violinist for an evening of Belorussian Polkas (from whom I
even learned 2 Jewish dances that they had learned in Minsk! I also
received my first copy of Beregovski's Ukrainian version of Klezmer
tunes from the violinist) and was invited to play solo concerts in 2
nearby villages after that. Following that we all became close friends.
But while I considered their attitude toward presenting their music
(e.g. NOT presenting their music) to the west as extreme, I'm no longer
sure that their fears were not justified. In fact, while the motivation
for them was to affirm and defend their ethnic identity first against
communist ideology and then against western commercialism I have learned
that the latter itself propogates its own ideologies by increasingly
excluding  traditional music from its midst. No, it's not a communist
policy but the process is exactly the same! The east block levelling of
specific ethnic identity was achieved by means of mixing together,
modernizing and re-unifying its diverse expressions into a hyper-culture
(sound familiar Eretz Yisroel?) which could be presented on a platter as
high national culture. In the west THE SAME process has happened in
world music - not from a political ideology but rather from an
industrial one. But the same mix and modernize process is there, only we
call it world music. Ethnic specificity went out the window. It's simply
not hip right now. The idea of developing music within a given set of
culturally determined parameters is no longer even perceived as a
possibility, if make our judgements based on media time, and the
techniques for doing so have wilted through lack of watering. Or rather,
they have been replaced by an industrial imperative which allows
cross-fertilization with other cultures, but not fertilization of its
own (hows that for flowery language?). After having said all this, don't
get me wrong. I'm not in the least against the
mainstream of whats happening in world Music, but do want to make a case
for equal air time.

So what does all this have to do with the friggin dimished chord in the
doina? Nothing and be glad for it, cuz its run its course....
In general, rural music of Romania when dealing with the 6th degree of
the Ukrainian Dorian mode (G-A-Bb-C#-D-E-F-G) i.e. here the E, usually
uses the fundamental chord (G minor) sometimes the II chord (A major).
There are sirbas which use a shifting of the whole mode, whereby the
first motive is in G dorian (above) and then the whole structure is
moved up a step to A dorian. In this case the harmonies move parallel,
Gm to Am and back down again. I think this is an older strain of
modality- simple shifting of everything (Even the makamat of Turko-
Arabic music glean their basic structure from transposition of
tetrachords). 

The tuning of the Jewish 3-string bratsh (groyse fidl) used throughout
the Transcarpathian bow uses a G-D-A  tuning whereby the C string is
taken off, the bridge shaved down and the A is tuned an octave DOWN
below the D (our viola player uses this tuning too). This makes it very
easy to play minor or major chords by simply placing one finger across
the G and D string and one finger on the A string in one fixed position
to play a major or minor chord which the player slides up or down. All
minor and major chords between the G and C are simple to play. To play
diminished chords in the same way you would have to retune the D up to E
or down to C#.  Otherwise playing them is possible, but not as
self-evident. Don't forget, many of the rural traditions are
string-based. I just don't know how wide-spread the so-called Jewish
tuning is, but would love to know.

I'll stop here, because my emails really are long and it's starting to
embarass me.  A zis un gebensht nay yor! Josh Horowitz

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