Re: klez go classical (was: Buena Vista Social Club)

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

Ari,

you wrote:

> Their interest is in building on tradition and in creating something, 
> appropriate to a formal concert hall, that is new.

When I read this, it hit the point right on the nose..."APPROPRIATE TO A
FORMAL CONCERT HALL..."

So the question is, who determines what is appropriate? What financial
effects are being aimed at and what influence does this have on the
aesthetics of the music?

Before I proceed to not answer these questions, I want to make a short
defense of Gerben's original *borrowing* of the terms 
*sophisticated*, *subtle* etc that Daniel took issue with. Knowing
Gerben as a serious researcher of klezmer music I think he is very aware
that he was taking a rhetorical stance with those terms- using them to
describe the aesthetic parameters set up by one group, but not
necessarily adhering to them himself. At least that's how I understood
them and used them myself.

Lets call a spade a spade: As soon as any of us set foot on a stage our
music is transformed by this environment. In this sense, the context
itself can determines the music as concertante, regardless of what is
happening in the music itself. Therefore we are all prey to
concertantism when we present our music in this way. This is a natural
process and it didn't begin in klezmer music with the revival movement
or with Yiddish theater. It actually began within the context of the
wedding itself (Tish nigns, dobranoces and the 
*Yiddishe Konzerte* which were written by klezmer composers in the late
18th and 19th centuries) and developed beyond this context when it was
permissable for Jews to study at conservatories.

As far as diversification goes: Comrades, unite! Without diversification
our beloved klezmer music will die! Make no mistakes about this, it's a
Parkinsonion law of musical economics. If we only had traditional or
classical forms of a genre, the audience would become bored awfully
fast. The living standard of the average musician is still commonly very
low, but compared to the misery, and I mean abject misery of musicians'
life in centuries past, we have come a long way. In the middle ages, 
musicians who were wronged by their employers were only allowed to slash
at the shadow with a sword, while their persecutor stood in front of a
wall in front of the sun, but was not allowed to be touched by the
victim. I for one don't want to give up the improved status of the
musician in our day. But realize that much of the archaic beauty of
certain music grows out of a specific economic mileau and aspects of
subtlety do die out as a result.  An example (please excuse me if it
gets technical): 

In Budowitz a phenomenon developed in the group before I had a name for
it -  it was simply the way we sounded. For purposes of description lets
call the phenomenon *Pitch sphere*....my accordion is tuned in the left
hand to around 436-438, and in the right hand to around 438-440. The C
ad Eb clarinets that Merlin plays circle around 436-441, the fiddles
gliss a lot and the cello can be as low 435 on any one note. That means
that any one note we play together won't be a clean pitch right on, but
rather a pitch 
*sphere* with a range of up to a throbbing 6 herz. Now, imagine what
happens when the violinist is playing in octaves with the clarinet, each
one trilling the note D, but the clarinet uses the upper note Eb as his
auxilliary note and the violin uses the C#. The accordion ornaments the
same note, but uses a turn with the notes E-D-C#-D. At the same moment
the viola is sliding into a D minor chord, but the Cello plays A-C#-D-F
as the bass line. What's the result? *Pitch Sphere*! The audience hears
the note D in the melody and senses the D minor harmony, but it's not a
clearly discernible, well-tempered, ready to consume, hygenically-tested
D, but rather a whole sphere of frequencies orbiting around the D with
noone playing the thing at the same time or same pitch. The effect is
for some people dissonant, for others emotional. I hear it also as
rhythm as well, because in acoustic terms dissonance is rhythm (if you
have frequencies closes to each other playing simultaneously, you get
*difference tones*, which sound like throbbing beats to the ear and this
is what rhythm is)....

But, last year we were double-billed with the Swiss group Kol Simcha for
a radio concert in Stuttgart. We were presented as the *traditional*
group and they as *modern*. Check out the following review in The
Stuttgarter Zeitung by Michael Werner:

?The 3 string players (of Budowitz) have the function of carefully
embalming as far as possible, the tears of the lost east European
shtetls. The fact that such music, with its superbly distorted rhythms
and its daring dissonances does more to punish than it does to
entertain, doesn?t detract from its fascination. And towards the end, as
the repeated ritual began to cripple itself, Budowitz was replaced by
Kol Simcha just in time. This group builds upon Budowitz?s tradition,
writes their own songs and pushes so energetically to the borders of
Klezmer. A bit of Jazz, a little bit of modern music, Hip-Hop beat here
and a Rock rhythm there and soon Klezmer becomes peppy, without giving
up the desire to preserve the tradition. On the contrary. The dynamic
nuances of the drummer...and clarinetist...transfer the feeling of the
shtetl-inhabitants into the big city of the 20th Century in a refined
manner.?  

It's dominance, pressure and insensitivity that gets my gizzard. I don't
like to be told by a record company to change my music to fit a trend
their trying to create, nor do I like to be rejected by a government
funded venue which we could potentially sell out, that our music is not
*fitting* to its image, nor do I like to read critiques from journalists
whose listening skills are as developed as a moldy bowl of muesli. And
*in a refined manner*, many of the musical trends you are hearing are
determined exactly by these people. 

But I may be wrong. It may be that suddenly one day last year, people
all across the world mysteriously woke up at the same time, got out of
bed with hands outstretched and glassy eyes In George Romero fashion,
walked irrepressibly to the nearest CD store and demanded from the
cashier in a monotone, *Give me a Cd of the 1950's Bolero singers
performing Cuban lounge music with Son musicians.*.... Everything's
possible. Josh

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