Re: tsvay strunes

[Joe Kurland <ganeydn...>]

If you don't want to ruin a good fiddle, you can get a reverse curve bow
and leave the bow hair rather loose.  This way you can play 3 strings at
once without flattening the bridge and switch to your regular bow for
playing melody.  Search for a Baroque bow or a Greek lyra bow to get one
with a reverse curve.

Now here's a question.  In Hungarian Gypsy fiddling, I understand that
sekund refers to counter melodies and Contra refers to the chording.  How
did sekund become the word for chording in Jewish fiddling.


Zayt gezunt (be healthy),

Yosl (Joe) Kurland
The Wholesale Klezmer Band
Colrain, MA 01340
voice/fax: 413-624-3204
http://www.crocker.com/~ganeydn


>I just wanted to mention that Steve Greenman has been playing tsvay strunes
>(though I can't recall the tuning he uses) with his new group Khevrisa (Steve,
>Zev Feldman, Stu Brotman & MIchael Alpert).  As Ari has mentioned, there
>will be
>an album coming out shortly.
>
>>>> Joshua Horowitz <horowitz (at) styria(dot)com> 09/12/99 11:41am >>>
>> 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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