[no subject]

[Jeffrey Miller/Burden of Proof Research <jefmil...>]

Re: Yiddish terms for Klezmer ornamentation.  Matt: interesting e-mail.  I
am slowly adapting klezmer tunes for fingerstyle guitar (no, it's not quite
the same sound the Klezmer Conservatory gets) and the ornamentation has to
fall by the wayside a lot. One is forced to go more for the feeling,
especially the little silences you "hear" at the edges of the ornaments,
which I think is salubrious, and fortifies the argument (which you find in
Celtic playing, as well), that the ornaments aren't the music.

On the guitar, of course, you can (and frequently do, these days) bend notes
by actually bending the strings to "portamento" the pitch.  
I find it interesting that you talk about "kvetching" as sounding like
quacks.  You can get this effect on an electric guitar by using a Cry-baby
(wah-wah) pedal, and I assume that the rocker-klezmer players do this
routinely.  For me, it's sort of cheating, but then, nobody ever called Jimi
Hendrix a cheater...

The krekhts you can sometimes get by rapid slurs, something akin to trilling
or related ornamentation.

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+