Re: Freilekhs or Bulgar?

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

MaxwellSt (at) aol(dot)com wrote:
 
> So is the Heyser Bulgar still a Bulgar 
> if you can't dance a Bulgar to it?  What about Serbas?  Does this all come 
> down to the idea that many dances share the same sort of rhythm but have 
> different dance steps depending on the country of origin?  (Serba = Serbia, 
> Honga = Hungary, Bulgar = Bulgaria, etc.)
> 
If I'm thinking of the same tune, Brandwine's "Heyser Bulgar" is the
same tune as a well-known Romanian geampara (a dance in 7/8, thus 2 + 
2 + 3), but I might be thinking of the wrong tune. This is a dance 
mostly done in Dobrogea and Wallachia in Romania and nearby Moldavia; 
the Bessarabian name, I understand, is _ostropets_. But Brandwine's 
accompanists changed the rhythm to a duple one. The _sarba_ (current 
orthography) is in fast 6/8 with a 2/4 overlay; the melody and 
cimbalom accompaniment are in 6/8, but accompaniment on second violin 
or accordion would be in 2/4. Jewish accompaniment also used this: 
hear the last tune on Max Leibowitz's "Orientalishe melodien," with 
Silver's tsimbl accompaniment (a 78 on the Emerson label). "Honga" is
_hangu_ in Romanian, with nothing to do with "Hungarian"; it's 
Bessarabian, but I don't recall anything about the one Moldovan 
recording I have. Zev Feldman's article says "bulgar" is derived from 
the Bessarabian "bulgareasca," but I don't have any Moldovan 
recordings of such a dance. 

I don't know anything about Jewish dance steps and subsequent 
modification of rhythms, but those particular ones are Bessarabian---
maybe as they spread to Ukrainian Jews and over to America the 
rhythms changed and the differences in the steps muddled. This 
happened to Romanian music in Cleveland and Detroit----a 1970s 
recording of a local band includes invartita melodies from 
Transylvania, but the 3 + 2 + 2 rhythm was transformed (under the 
influence of a Bulgarian-American drummer) to something weirder. 
This particular group, "The Blue Tones," incidentally, has a 
"Bucovina Polka" on its record, which is a well-recorded klezmer 
tune. This tradition's origins seem to go back to Simion (Sammy) 
Duka, who came from Iacobeni, in Bucovina (Moldavia), to Cleveland, 
in the late 1880s, and played clarinet and trumpet. They used to play 
for Jewish weddings in addition to Romanian and weddings of other 
nationalities. In Romania today (or at least among recent Romanian 
immigrants), the polka is regarded as a "German" dance---people from 
areas, like Banat, with a lot of Germans, dance it. But probably when 
the polka became popular pan-ethnically in the U.S. in the '30s and 
'40s, this group took this Jewish or Bucovinan tune and standardized 
it among themselves as a polka. Probably similar things happened in 
New York City, under the influence of Kammen folios, etc.

Paul Gifford

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