Re: Dreydlekh, etc.

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

-- Budowitz Home Page: http://www.merlinms.dircon.co.uk/budowitz/


> And Joshua - surely you could provide insight into all these words...you
> probably have a closet full of klezmer ornament examples, 5183 of which are
> possible and 65 of which are used, each with their own incredibly esoteric
> name. ;-)

um, actually I've only counted 4 in the contemporary klezmer scene, but
there's hope that these will bear offspring... Your exposé was great Matt,
and the art of ornamentation is, for my ears, the most important aspect of
learning klezmer music, because it was through ornamentation that new
melodies arose. It's a huge subject. Most of my practicing time learning a
new melody is spent noodling around with ornaments. Heterophony is really
just ornamentation. Phrasing is ornamentation. Fills are ornamention.
Cadential variation is ornamentation. Even chocolate ice cream is
ornamentation....

It's fun to search for the terms for all the doodads of Ornamentation (can
we just call it "Otation" for the sake of brevity? or maybe just O. ) Fact
is, there are no fixed terms for the stuff that goes on in klezmer music,
just tendencies, and these are probably products of the 20th century. But
our need to name, codify, compartmentalize, analyze and discuss gives the
illusion that there must have been a common language for this stuff. But
nothing is more inexact than the vocabulary of oral traditions. In short,
there was never a universal technical or even descriptive terminology for
describing the musical phenomenae of klezmer music. Sure, there's
klezmer-loshn and there are borrowings from the Italian and German
terminology cache, but I'm sure that what the Kishenever Klezmorim called a
Kneytsh, the Ternapoler called a Kvetsh, the Dubasarer called a shlukerts,
while Itzik der shtumer placed his small left finger in his ear with his
thumb pointing up to indicate what the Germans call a Nachschlag and the
French called an eschapee.

You may have noticed that the terms for O. in klezmer music are descriptive
and not technical, in contrast to what you find in the high styles of the
late Rennaissance and Baroque. There was never an attempt to codify the
terms used in klezmer music (which you're doing just now, Matt, 400 years
after the heyday of the same undertaking in European upper class music).
There was a gigantic corpus of literature on ornamentation going back to the
15th century, which all but fizzled out by the 18th century. Check out
Frederick Neumann's "Ornamentation in Baroque and Post Baroque Music" for a
compendium of the hundreds of ornaments which have been documented by the
upper classes through the centuries. Then listen to Belf to hear them all.
Did Belf discuss with his first fiddler where he was going to play a Kneytsh
while the fiddler played a kvetsh? I doubt it. But did Dave Tarras refer to
it as a Krekhts when telling Andy not to do too much of it? Sounds like it.
Probably Makonovetski also used some other term for it with his students as
well. When Majer Bogdanski taught us the forshpils and nokhshpils on our new
CD, we played him a rehearsal tape to see what he thought..."It's fine but
there's too many hiccups in the violin. Take out the hiccups. " Later he
said, "You have to play it with a Kneytsh" and when he demonstrated, there
it was, the ubiquitous so-called "Krekhts."

As far as the levels of ornamentation go, I teach my students two levels:
The macro and the micro (there they are again, those terms). The levels are
very easy to understand. The macro level of O. are the things which you do
on a melodic level, like filling in a fourth. If you are in G minor and you
have a D leading up to a G, it's easy to "fill in the spaces" with
D-Eb-F#-G. That's a type of ornamentation. In Baroque and pre-Baroque music
that technique was called diminution. Cantors use it too.

Macro-ornamention is the essence of the formation of new melodies. Pete
Sokolow's comments on ornamentation are very modern. If you listen to Belf
(our most ornamented examples of klezmer music on record), you hear constant
ornamention. But Belf's ornamentation style is almost entirely
micro-ornamentation. That means he deals with the nuance of one or two
notes. His ornaments are fast and usually only decorate one note and not a
whole line. Brandwein's style is much more macro-oriented, though he also
ornaments on a micro level. But he is wont to fill out lines, to change them
at the repeat or find a different path between 2 notes than what was in the,
uh, original melody. Same with Tarras. In fact, the macro style of
ornamentation took over klezmer music, leaving the multitude of micro
nuances behind. Virtually no one in the scene today ornaments on a level
that Belf did. Good micro ornamentation will not obscure the melody because
it stays too close to it to do that. It's macro ornamentation that screws up
the line. Even the best in the klezmer scene are guilty of sacrificing the
natural rhythm of a line for a macro-ornament, yet I don't know a single
phrase in Belf's entire available opus where that happens.

But to end this blathering, or should I say blubbering - no, lets call it
blabbering... in the classical world the entire study of species
counterpoint was nothing more than a study of macro ornamentation, whereas
the art of "embellishment" (micro-ornamentation) was treated as a separate
entity for the performer.

In klezmer music you have exactly the same levels, but no strict rules and
therefore no strict terminology. Those two go hand in hand. If you want to
spend time creating a fixed artificial language for the incidence of
ornaments, you can do it, but you will have a hell of a time finding
consistent historical precedents for it. You will find an occasional term
which was fairly common, but klezmer music is an entirely uncodifed music.
It WAS basically an "aurally" transmitted music, but is not as much anymore.
Whether the search for consistency and a fixed terminology is the first sign
of a death sentence to klezmer music, or whether it merely signifies its
initiation into the established music world is open to debate. Josh Horowitz


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