Re: recorders and Jewish instruments

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

Hope Ehn Dennis Ehn <ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com> wrote:
> 
> The fact that Jews were known to play recorders and viols in other
> contexts strengthens the likelihood that these instruments were what they
> used also for playing specifically Jewish music. There is some evidence
> that at least in Italy, Jewish musicians were hired for non-Jewish
> weddings. If non-Jews went out of their way to hire Jews, this would
> suggest that they wanted a kind of music that only Jewish musicians
> played, and that non-Jewish musicians did not know. For a wedding
> celebration, this would probably have been Jewish dance music. This does
> not mean, of course that dance music was the only genre of Jewish music. 
> 
In Lwow during the early 17th century, there were "Italian" musicians 
and "Serbian" musicians. These didn't refer to their nationality, but 
to the type of music, or instruments, they played. "Italian" music was
standard European early baroque music (associated with the Catholic 
world), and required training associated with a guild. Jews were 
excluded. "Serbian" musicians played the _serbska_, or "Serbian" 
fiddle, the Byzantine fiddle (which was also used in Moldavia in the 
16th century), as well as the cymbal, the szyposz (this was the 
equivalent of a recorder, derived from the Hungarian word _sipos_), 
and the hurdy-gurdy. One combination that seems to have been standard 
with "Serbian" musicians was two _serbska_ and cymbal. This 
information comes from an article by Aleksandra Szulcowna, 1959, and 
Barbara Szyglo(?)-Ceglowa, Karol Radecki, and others. The "Italian" 
musicians played at court and church; the "Serbian" musicians played 
at weddings and banquets.

A list of Jewish musicians in 1629 in Lwow includes one with the by-
name "Bass" and another with "Cymbalista." What I believe happened is
that Jews by that time probably had adopted the violin and bass (from 
the "Italian" musicians) and the cymbal from the "Serbian" musicians. 
The latter instrument would have substituted for the harpsichord. The 
two violins/dulcimer/bass combination would then have been a hybrid of 
the "Italian" and "Serbian" music. From Lwow, Jewish musicians would 
have spread the style to Prague and then from there to Germany, 
Moravia, and Hungary, where Gypsies began to adopt the 
instrumentation by about 1750, and Germans maybe a little earlier.

Galician Jews may have used the szyposze in the late 16th and 
early 17th centuries, but that would be only a guess. It's worth 
noting that the fipple flute and bagpipes are universally played by 
peasants in Eastern Europe, but not much by Gypsies. The _sopilka_ 
(fipple flute) of the Hutsuls in western Ukraine is used with violin 
and tsymbaly and bass drum/tambourine and that may go back to the 
16th-century "Serbian" musicians of eastern Galicia, and klezmorim 
also used the tambourine and drum, but in researching instrumentation 
of klezmer ensembles, I haven't run across any evidence of it. But if 
it were once a part, it probably would have come from outside the art 
music world.

Paul Gifford

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