Re: Tsimbl revisited 2

[Paul M. Gifford <PGIFFORD...>]

Joshua Horowitz <horowitz (at) styria(dot)com> wrote:
>   
> > OK.  Do you think Moskowitz was the tail end of this 'tsimbl soloist'
> > tradition, or was he more of a maverick, doing something new (the concert
> > cymbalom was pretty 'new' in early 1900s)?
> 
> Moskowitz represents for me a quantum leap from the Jewish tsimblists of
> the 19th Century to the concert and cafe tsimblist. His father was a
> tsimbler so I'm sure Joseph must have started on the smaller models
> which were common in Jewish music. I've always thought of Moskowitz as a
> modern day cafe player (not meant as criticism). His repertoire is
> eclectic and sophisticated and his style is urban Romanian almost
> through and through. So I don't see him as the tail of a Jewish
> tradition, but at the beginning of the modern concert/cafe tradition. Bu
> again the problem is, we only have a smattering of his playing Jewish
> repertoire, and what we do have is very concertante. The lion's share of
> his recorded rep is popular salon stuff. But his repertoire I'm sure
> included masses of Jewish pieces, and I'm sure he could play in the
> older simpler style as well as the concertante style he recorded in. 

According to Moskowitz's granddaughter, he bought his cimbalom in 
Budapest. This would have been around 1900 or soon afterwards. At 
that time, the large instrument was only being introduced to the 
Regat in Romania. It seems that a Gypsy, Lica Stefanescu, was one of 
the first to use the big one and to develop a solo style (don't know 
his family connections---he was probably related to George 
Stefanescu, naiist with Dinicu, who settled in New York City in 1939). 
A photo of a Romanian Gypsy group taken in Baku about that time, 
however, shows a rather unique-looking instrument, not a Hungarian 
one. I agree that Moskowitz had a "concertante" style, writing 
down arrangements and playing from memory, rather than playing by ear. 
But I wouldn't say his style was "urban Romanian"; his Romanian tunes 
are Moldavian, like "Trandafir din Moldova" (which is the standard 
Moldavian song played to announce Moldavian identity), "La Bacau" 
(which is regarded today as a Jewish song), plus horas. There isn't 
really any muzica lautareasca in his recordings, such as that played 
by the Gypsy groups from Bucharest that were very popular in Russia 
before 1917. Nicolae Feraru (who plays in Toni Iordache's style), on 
first hearing Moskowitz's 1954 recording, thought his playing to be 
"curious"---it was a particular style he had never heard.
>
Tim asked about damping: Romanian cloth versus undampened Ukrainian/
Polish.
> We have virtually no info about this. The only old Jewish tsimbl I ever
> got a chance to see was the one given to Anski by Rabinovitch I took all
> its measurements and will be publishing the results on my study of the
> tsimbl at the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna in 2002. The strings
> are so thin and delicate with lower tension (probably 7-10 kilos, as
> opposed to today's Romanian constructions, which have 40-50kilos), that
> I'm pretty sure they DIDN'T dampen. The dampening is common when 
> piano wire is used, which is a new development (since the Schunda 
> concert cymbalom)

The Romanian tzambal mic uses brass wire and a short string length---
its tension is very low. Older Ukrainian instruments also used brass.
Probably a lot of Jewish instruments used mainly brass wire at one 
time. But I think the Romanian damping is a result of the 
instrument's taking over the role of the cobza. The older Hungarian 
cimbalom (without felt dampers) was dampened by the forearms or 
fingers at each chord change---you can see that Moskowitz wore velvet 
dampers tied onto his forearms, even though his instrument had spring 
or weight-operated dampers. Most likely Moskowitz learned that 
technique in Hungary, and had a Hungarian instrument without dampers. 
There is also a Ukrainian-Canadian technique of dampening the strings 
with the sides of the hands, but that is not routine.

Probably techniques and traditions in Rzeszow and Belarus are closer 
to Jewish tradition than those in western Ukraine, since non-Jews in 
the latter region have been playing it since the 17th century. Piotr 
Dahlig and others regard the peasant tradition in Rzeszow as a recent 
borrowing from Jewish tradition. But there are many similarities in 
all three areas.

Paul Gifford

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