Re: klez go classical

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

Hi Dan,

> i'm flattered to be described as "difficult to keep on a leash" <smile>
> and 'course i don't mind being shredded and reassembled, but i would prefer
> my tangents and asides be less central to your response, josh...

Don't take it personally. It's not you who is difficult to keep on a
leash, but rather the rhetoric of your last posting. Likewise, I sure
didn't to shred and reassemble you, but rather what I saw as your
implied syllogisms. Do stay intact, Daniel. Please. We need you.
 
> my basic point (as distinctly opposed to your 'socratic summary') has always
> been about *emphasis*, not exclusion (the first time "banning" anything came
> up in this thread was when you put it in my mouth--please take it right back
> out, 'kay?). 

I'm with you. Term "ban" withdrawn.

withdraw i'm in no way opposed to sitting in a concert hall listening
> to klezmer (or tuvan 'throat singing' or stravinski for that matter).  what
> i see as potentially dangerous is the concert hall becoming the *only* or
> *primary* site for klezmer music.

This hyperbole didn't appear in your posting. As for *dangerous*, do
concert halls have canines?

> incidentally, you imply that there's a contradiction between dancing to and
> listening to music.  if anything, i'd want to argue that the opposite is
> true-- you just *can't* dance without paying serious attention to the
> musicians; it's easy to sit and drift...  it's also worth mentioning that
> venues with space to dance tend also to accomodate those who just want to
> sit, while concert halls tend to frown upon dancing (with some
> exceptions--the 'in the fiddler's house' tour being the first to occur to
> me).

What you write in your first sentence above is an extrapolation. We see
eye to eye here...
  
> finally, it seems more than a bit disingenuous to describe "listening" in
> the concert-hall sense as part of the traditional wedding context of
> klezmer. 

That's not from me. I'll repeat and elaborate: the listening genres of
klezmer have their roots in the context of the wedding. One modern-day
logical extension of the genres created in that context would be the
concert hall. Whereas the modern-day Jewish wedding typically offers
less opportunity for listening genres of music than did the earlier
weddings, the concert hall represents a logical outlet for them. That
says nothing about the way in which the concert hall alters the
aesthetic direction of those genres, but rather merely that it offers
another context in which they can propogate.  

> that's it for me....

you let me off light.

> p.s. "hidden agenda"?  what's *hidden*?

That's easy: You want to molotov-cocktail all the concert halls in New
York  playing concertized Yiddish music, tear up the seats in all the
venues worth their weight in government subsidies to make room for
breakdancing orgies, employ DJ's to rap in Yiddish and station big ole
hairy 6-foot bouncers with black suits and sunglasses at the doors of
all Jewish concerts to insure that Klezmer music gets played in the way
that's relevant to nipple-pierced pubescents with authority complexes
while handing out machine-rolled reefers in papers that read, "the
'matics are cool but gimme kletka red". You can't fool me. Josh

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