The end is nearer than you think

[Uravreml <Uravreml...>]

Hi, folks! It's cold, dark and pre-Christmasy here in Berlin - a perfect 
moment to reflect on klezmer endings. I apologize in advance if I'm repeating 
something that has been elaborated before on this list.

I want to recall that the very concept of an "ending" is not intrinsic to 
many musical traditions. Any performance of music comes to a stop eventually, 
of course: when the text runs out, when the dancers get tired, generally, 
when the function the music serves is over or has been interrupted.  What we 
think of as an "ending," though, is a concept inherited from Western art 
music (and more generally from Western aesthetics - think of the dramaturgic 
structure of Greek plays, for example). "Ending" is an aesthetic construct 
that belongs together with "beginning" and "development," and for that reason 
the ending of a piece tends to be elaborated in proportion to its beginning 
and development, the whole package striving for the famous "organic unity" 
that was one of the guiding principles in Western aesthetics until this 
century. 

(To see how universal the "ending" isn't, think of those early field 
recordings we've all heard where the musicians just sort of "break off" at a 
certain point. The surprise we feel when we first hear such recordings 
reflects our expectation that a musical performance is a piece, and should 
have a proper ending, not just a giving up.)

One of the telltale signs of a proper ending is that it gets "prepared for" 
by musical gestures that say "the end is near." Now, if you think for a 
minute about klezmer music, especially the dance repertoire, it's clear that, 
although there are musical gestures that indicate first and second endings of 
individual sections, there are no musical gestures that indicate the end of 
the piece itself, i.e., there's no real preparation signalling that the end 
is near, i.e., it sounds pretty much the same four bars before a section 
repeat and four bars before the end. That's why the following conventions 
have evolved: i) the lead instrument breaks into a trill a bar or so before 
stopping, hoping the other musicians  will hear, look over, and through 
mutual head-nodding and eye-popping agree that this is indeed the end, ii) 
the most nervy player (or band leader, as the case may be) holds up a fist, 
meaning "last time around," knowing that a visual cue is the only unambiguous 
way to signal the end.

All of this is appropriate to music that is meant to be played over and over 
for dancers, whose tunes in practice have to be chain-able together. After 
Oedipus blinds himself we don't want to start all over again with him as a 
cute baby, nor do we want to hear the first movement again after the chorus 
has already sung "Ode to Joy." But we DO want to hear the A section of a 
freylekhs again after we've heard the C section, in fact, in a good tune the 
C section seems to even lead us back to the A section again, like a circle or 
a spiral, so we can work ourselves up into a real frenzy dancing. (Nod here 
to chassidic ideas...)

So where does this leave us? The simple I-V-I klezmer ending (not really, but 
let's call it that) is the minimal cadence, one step away from just breaking 
off.  In my view it's one more piece of evidence for what I call the 
"transitional status" of klezmer music of the late 19th - early 20th 
centuries, caught in between different social/musical functions; in the case 
of the freylekhs, no longer simply functional dance music but not yet an 
aesthetic object, i.e. a "piece" of music.  In this connection it's worth 
noting that one of the earliest attempts to innovate in the klezmer revival 
was the creation of individual endings, including even simply holding the 
last chord out long while the drummer went crazy, resulting in something that 
satisfied contemporary listeners' appetites for a Real Ending. Contrast the 
Real Ending with the same I-V-I gesture on historical recordings, and it 
becomes clear how perfunctory that gesture was, i.e., a convention rather 
than something with individual musical meaning.

None of this tells us exactly when or why that convention evolved, but I hope 
it helps to contribute to the conceptual framework in which we think about it.

Alan

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