Re: Keep it up, Josh!

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

> May I second that? (Now where can I get an old viola?)
> Lucy

Hi Lucy, 

even if your parenthetic question was rhetorical in nature, I want to
say that it's a great idea to get into the intricacies of contra
playing. In eastern Europe, although almost every good primas can play
contra (Yidd. Sekund) as well (Some Gypsies only let their kids play
contra for years before they are allowed to melody in the ensemble), the
job of contra playing is a full-time one. Our contra player ONLY plays
contra (okay, he is also the cook of the band). The difference between
playing with him and playing with musicians not familiar with the 
full-time job of contra playing is that he accepts his position in the
band (poor unwitting soul) and never says "I'm bored and want to do
something else." He's responsible for coordinating breaks with the
cello, voicing the chords to support what's happening in the melody,
solidfying tempo changes and determining articulation of the rhythm
through broad bowings or short bowings, etc, and suggesting alternate
harmonies. It really is a job, and it would be great to see folks in the
klezmer scene take the time to find a good contra player to find out
what a seemingly simple job really entails. If you have a Hungarian
community in your area, check out if there are any bands playing (they
have developed the job of contra to an artful science). It would also be
great to see someone learn how to play the Jewish *tsvay strunes* style
(2 string style), which involved taking the high E string of the violin
and tuning it DOWN to the A an octave below the A string, filing an
extra notch in the nut so as to move the string closer to the A string
to enable playing both of the strings at the same time and playing
melodies sempre glissando. You can hear this technique played a bit by
Abe Schwartz on the Doina portion of the well-known National Hora. It is
a very dissonant string sound, and noone in the scene has yet had the
patience or (am I allowed to say) courage to *ruin* their violins to
develop this technique. And if you can't find an old viola, take the
plunge and ruin your present axe. It's still more fun than playing
obbligato lines in the Mozart Klarinet Konzert...

In spite of the notion that modernization of klezmer music has brought
more 
*dissonance* to the music, in fact the opposite is true in my opinion.
The regularity of beat, roundness of tone, the replacement of
non-harmonically oriented passages with colorful harmonies, the
replacement of ambiguous cadential chords with clear ones and the
uni-modal harmonization of formerly poly-modal passages in many modern
reworkings of neo-traditional klezmer music has resulted in an end
result which is actually more consonant than the older klezmer styles.

When I studied counterpoint privately in Boston with Hugo Norden, olav
ha shulem, I remember him once saying that the counterpoint books of
today got everything wrong by teaching students to use dissonance
sparingly and correctly. An in-depth analysis of Bach's music will often
show that his most moving pieces have an extremely high density of
dissonance, as this is where the music derives its emotional power from.
And dissonance need not always be treated correctly to be effective.
There are parallels....Good luck!  Josh

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