Re: Dreydlekh, etc.

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

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

> Thank you to those of you who replied to my post.... And to Joshua, for
letting my post be longer than yours for once.

Sure, but it wasn't half as uninteresting as mine, Matt. You've still got
some work to do there. Try using more senseless adjectives, pointless
diversions and  pseudo scientific terms. Then bring it into a non-existent
historical context. Only then will your mails equal mine in obscurity and
uselessness.

My comments on your post were actually not as critical as I ended up
sounding. I think it's a great idea to try to make a compendium, but why
stop at the cream on the top? I think it would be great to have a revival of
the "high style" of klezmer, in which not 4 ornaments are used, but
hundreds. Maybe the first step in reviving this aspect of the music is to
gather terms and technique explanations.

My comment about the undertaking of such a study being possibly a death
sentence is based upon the thought that, as soon as methodical or
technically demontrative works emerge onto the scene, it seems to indicate
the necessity of the task, not because of waxing interest, but rather
because of waning interest or one person's crusade to resuscitate (sp?) an
already dead style. See Zarlino's late 16th century treatise, Institutioni
harmoniche, which was outdated by the time it first came out, requiring
several rewritings before he died. See Bach's last works (The Musical
Offering, Goldberg Variations and the Art of the Fugue), all of which are
encyclopedic workings of complex counterpoint, which he penned in a
desperate attempt to uphold the late Baroque infatuation with proportion and
symmetry which his own sons were obliterating through their dilly-dallying
with the oversimplified "style galant." See Rimsky Korsakov's Orchestration
book, which tried to sum up 19th century orchestration practices, but was
already obsolete before it's first printing when Debussy hit the scene.

In klezmer music, Henry Sapoznik's Compleat Klezmer was a blessing and a
curse at the same time. While it gave musicians a small compendium of tunes
which could be bought at your corner music store, it also served to reduce
the oral repertoire of a whole tradition from a standard cache of perhaps
2000 tunes into a double LP size of 33 tunes. Has the scene recovered from
that reduction? Exceptions aside, I would have to say that even the
so-called avant garde scene has a Tarras-Brandwein-Compleat klezmer
fixation. That's not Henry's fault. On the contrary, he did and is doing his
share. But standardization is standardization no matter what you use for
topping. And teaching methods have to standardize to fulfill their goals.
Nowadays we may have about 200 tunes (I've never counted and may be totally
off) circulating in various forms in the klezmer scene, and although
probably your average band may have a larger klezmer tune rep than the
average kapelye from 1890, the entire repertoire has shrunk to the size of a
crumbling Manoshevitz matzoh.

To be fair, this is self-criticism, Matt, as what you are doing now I'm also
guilty of in excess. Your attempts are good for teaching and explaining. The
act of gathering categorizing, naming and publishing itself serves to inform
about aspects which are useful for practitioners. Leopold Mozart's violin
method was useful for Wolfgang Amadeus and a few others. Johann Fux's work
on counterpoint, Gradus ad Parnassum was used as a standard text for
musicians and is still used to today, but aside from being a useful
handbook, it's a misleading guide toward the depths of the art, because it
petrifies it. Please understand that I'm just being a philosophical nebbish
playing prophet. I have my crystal ball in front of me. After saying the
mantra "Oy vey, bin ikh a shmendrik, als ikh vel shpiln mit ornamentik,"
the ball says back, "als du vilst spiln mit ornamentiks, kumt aroys der
Jimmy Hendriks (I trust you will correct the Yiddish Reyzl).

We're still at the fetal stage of the klezmer revival, which is an ironic
thing to say, because the perimeters of the scene have stretched the
language a bit, and there are lots of bands practicing the music in some
form or another. But the basics of the style have shrunk to a handful of
ornaments, a burlap sack full of tunes and a standard instrumentation which
could compete with Dairy Farm for the FDA prize in homogenisation. In short,
lets see more of this ornamentation stuff....Josh

 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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