RE: Dreydlekh, etc.

[Matt Jaffey <mjaffey2...>]

Thank you to those of you who replied to my post.

To Jeffrey Miller, to whom I have already replied. To Seth, whose pithy
response shows that brevity is the soul of, um, well brevity, and is good
salesmanship as well. Good luck with your new book, I'll be ordering mine
when it comes out. To Sandra, for your humorous but informative explanation
of the "boid'tyaa" (I'll stick with your revised placement of the
apostrophe). And to Joshua, for letting my post be longer than yours for once.

Sandra - Do you know of any recorded examples of the "boid'tyaa"?
particularly from Tarras or Brandwein? A picture is worth a thousand words
and all that. From your description alone, it still sounds like a
difference of degree from your run of the mill krekhts rather than an
entirely different ornament.

Joshua - I want to respond to three different topics from your message:
1) Labels for ornaments
2) The relationship of melody to ornamentation
3) Practice strategies for aspiring Klezmer musicians, such as myself

If I try to fit all three into one email, it'll never get posted, so I'm
covering only #1 this time. The others later.

LABELS FOR ORNAMENTS

<<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.>>

This gives more significance to what I was trying to do than I intended. I
wasn't planning to start the project of classification of everything. A few
words came up. I suppose there are a few others that people use today that
didn't come up (I just came across another today - shmir'n for
slides/portamento). I just assumed that these words had generally accepted
meanings.

<<You will find an occasional term which was fairly common>>

Good! Let's share those with each other so that we are speaking a common
language to that extent.

After reading your email, my tendency to categorize got diverted from the
ornaments to the words themselves:

a) Words with specific meanings generally agreed upon

This is what I started out assuming applied to the five words that started
all this. You said: <<You may have noticed that the terms for O. in klezmer
music are descriptive
and not technical>>. Well, take the krekhts for example. It's descriptive
if it refers to choked sobs, moans or whatever. But there are ways that
musicians know about to produce that sound. So, to a musician, the term
includes the technique, or techniques of doing so. I thought it would be
clarifying to include technical information along with the descriptive. As
for the dreydl, there seem to be some technical definitions out there  - at
least Andy Statman used one. Don't know what to make of that.

b) Words with general meanings generally agreed upon

It seems that dreydlech can fit in that category, if indeed it can be used
to refer to ornaments in general. And what about the word Shleyfer that you
used in your cd liner notes. Still wondering what that means.

c) Words used in a poetic sense

If someone says, "you could hear the clarinet kvelling and kvetching", that
might just be a way of calling to mind the sound and feeling of a Klezmer
clarinet, without meaning anything more specific. Interestingly, a word
could fit in any of these first three categories, and if a person doesn't
know the word, he wouldn't have a clue which way it was being used. So when
Seth said <<(Felicia) has a deep voice, which swung from cantorial style,
with the requisite krekhtsn, tshoks and kneytshn all in the right
places...>>, for a lot of us, these words could have had specific meaning,
or could have been poetry only, and we wouldn't have known.

d) Words used by a few people to describe an ornament in general use

This was the main thrust of your discussion. You showed how the same
ornament could be named differently by different people. For example, what
you called a Krekhts, Majer Bogdanski called a Kneytsh. That is very
interesting. But let's go the other way around. Start with the word that
someone is using. What does it mean to that person? Do different people use
the same word to have significantly different meanings? After all, there
are some concrete ornamental practices underlying the words that people
actually use (or used).

[FYI: For the record, you said <<But did Dave Tarras refer to it as a
Krekhts when telling Andy not to do too much of it? Sounds like it.>> You
probably should replace the word Krekhts with the word Kvetch. Andy Statman
didn't use the word Krekhts even once on his video. He refered to the
ornament in question as a Kvetch. I don't know if Dave Tarras did also,
only that Dave Tarras told him not to do too much of it.]

e) Ornaments used by a few people, not in general use

You talked about how the same ornament was named differently in different
locales. But can you say anything about regional differences in the
ornaments themselves? What stands out more about ornamental usage in
klezmer, its homogeneity or its diversity?

Incidentally, I'm not sure whether the "boid'tyaa" belongs in category (d)
or (e). i.e., is it a word used by a few people to describe an ornament in
general use? or is it an ornaments used by a few people, not in general
use? (Sandra?)

f) Ornaments without names

>From what you said about all the Baroque ornamentation being found in Belf,
there must be a lot of these. And we can agree to not try to start naming
them now.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Boy was this ever dry! The other topics I want to discuss look more
promising for their musical interest. Well, it's been a long day.

Matt


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