Re: new Budowitz album, Wedding without a Bride, now out

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

Just wanted to plague you all with an infomercial of the new Budowitz CD.

Homeopathy and Budowitz

Thoughts on the new CD, ³Wedding Without a Bride,² Buda Musique Nr. 92759-2,
Paris, 2000

It all started when we heard Majer Bogdanski for the first time...when we
first asked him if we could interview and learn from him, we had no idea of
the extent of his memory and knowledge of Jewish Music. Sure, we had
indulged in endless discussions among ourselves about what it means to
harmonize old melodies, to exchange forms, to modernize, to alter and adapt
to the times and how to develop all this from within the confines of the
specific klezmer style, etc, etc. But in fact, one thing was missing- noone
had ever really tried to recreate the Jewish wedding completely, allowing it
to speak to us directly. Everyone was changing, improving and modernizing
(we ourselves, too and gladly) but one thing was left out of the picture: We
had no music of the entire East European Jewish wedding from beginning to
end. You would think that would be a prerequisite for development -  I mean,
would you say, I¹m going to improve on the Parthenon, without having
measured its proportions, analysed its materials and understood its
function? How can you develop upon something you haven¹t internalized? Isn¹t
your development then actually a kind of ³karaoke kunst,²with the new ideas
simply stuck onto the top of a pre-existing foundation? So you take the
ostensible elements, recreate them in a truncated way, leave out the more
time-consuming techniques of construction, then allow that to serve as a
fundament to build upon. But then we stumbled upon the age-old priniciple of
form follows function and realized that we couldn¹t submerge ourselves in
this project without observing its laws first.

The first time we heard Majer Bogdanski sing an entire bazingns, we were
amazed. For 10 years we had been searching for someone who could at least
tell us something about this rare and forgotten form. Musicologists agreed
that it formed a key to understanding important central questions as to how
klezmer music has developed in this century - questions of modality, of the
atmosphere of the Jewish wedding, of the origin of the forms which later
took their place, in short, it was a kind of missing link. And yet, like
most important discoveries, it appeared when we weren¹t looking for it. In a
kami-kaze mood at the question and answer portion following his wonderful
lecture at the London Symposium on Yiddish Music in 1997, we asked Majer if
he could remember portions of the kale bazetsns ritual of the East European
Jewish wedding. Without batting an eye, Majer reeled off the entire
instrumental and vocal parts of the ritual, and continued without hesitation
to sing a complete khosn bazingns, which we had never intended to request,
as we had already considered the kale bazetsns an unreasonable challenge.
Only a few people in the audience understood the gravity of what was
happening. One of them, thankfully, was Majer himself. Merlin and I couldn¹t
be subdued. We grabbed Majer at the first opportunity and asked him to
repeat what he had just done, and he did so next to the coffee machine in
the faculty lounge while we stood there transfixed, forgetting to drink the
cooling liquid in our styrophoam cups, while Majer effortlessly but
intensively sang the violin and bass part. I kicked myself for not having
surgically grafted my recording equipment to my hip for moments like these.

Our next step was to schedule sessions with him to record him, and within 3
months we had gotten a small grant from the David Herzog Fonds in Graz,
Austria, to do 3 days of audio-video documention of Majer at the BBC studios
in London. Our first concern was to get as many versions of his bazingns as
possible, to check for variants to determine what were the improvised and
what were the fixed portions of the genre and to see how his ornamentation
changed, whether the candences were exchanged, etc. We recorded Majer so
many times that he eventually laughed, ³Are you trying to torture me?² After
getting his life history details and documenting more than 50 units of music
(not including the bazestns!) we left it for 2 years, after which Merlin
went back to re-record him again in 1999, repeating the torture tactics
which we had subjected Majer to already in 1997.

The detailed task of transcribing the parts and arranging the music for the
Budowitz ensemble included listening to all our surviving early 78 r.p.m.
record satires of kale bazetsns in our collection, as well as analyzing the
written manuscripts we had gathered. Majer amazed us again by sending his
own transcription of the bazetsns session, and after months of combing our
entire collection of everything we had at our disposal, we were able to
piece together the sequence to create the version on the wedding CD. In
addition to our meetings with Majer, we also visited the Polish badkhn and
former Yiddish Theatre actor, Toyvye Birnbaum at his home in Brighton Beach,
New York. Toyvye is a master of the age-old art of improvising couplets in
Yiddish, called ³gramen². As it happens, Toyve could improvise brilliantly
both the kale and khosn bazingns, so we were able to learn and compare his
style with that of Majer¹s, which proved essential to us in understanding
questions as to what is perhaps common to all bazetsns and what is variable,
as well as the strophic structure and what the emotional nodal points of the
ceremony are. In processing the instrumental portions, we were guided in our
choice of repertoire by an instinct of combining tunes whose motives were at
times related to those found in the bazetsns, and which seemed as though
they grew out of a common ³musical DNA code.²

Following our meetings with Majer, Merlin and I visited Jeremiah Hescheles
in Manhatten with Zev Feldman to interview him. Jeremiah was overjoyed when
we played for him and assured us that our style was just as it should be.
Jeremiah gave us so much information we¹ve yet hardly even begun to process
it. I still call him to chat and learn more from his immense cache of
experience and knowledge. Because Jeremiah came from Gliniany, not far from
Piotrkow, we were able to add bits of the puzzle together to help us to
understand the questions of regionality in klezmer music. The string players
in Budowitz, Tamás Gombai, Sándor Tóth, and Zsolt Kuertoesi, are experts in
playing the ³duevoe² style of accompaniment commonly played throughout the
Transcarpathian region of Romania. This style involves a rhythmic legato
bowing technique which is also used by Polish Goralsky musicians in southern
Poland.The styles apparently have a common source. When Jeremiah mentioned
that Rabbi Shapiro of Piotrkow loved the Goralsky style and asked his
klezmorim often to play prayers in that style, we were overjoyed. When
Merlin tried out one of Majer¹s Piotrkower Nigunim with this style of
accompaniment, the effect was gorgeous. No rehearsal was necessary. We
recorded it as part of the table music (track 13).

In our search for the most fitting themes possible we were again faced with
the question which is posed again and again in our work: How can we bring
out the most expression from our material and make it personal. To not only
record it, but to make it specific to our own style? We have never seen
ourselves as revivalists, despite the label given to us at times. A central
part of the work of Budowitz is to see ourselves as part of the tradition we
are working within. In realizing this, some of us in the post-modern world
would tend to use any techniques at our disposal. However, we soon
discovered that the less we did, the more energy was released from the
melodies. Our accompaniment became so sparse that we found ourselves saying
"Yes, that¹s it, that¹s the perfect acompaniment!" just as noone was playing
anything anymore. In truth, our ears became even more sensitive to the
overuse of ³harmony² than they had been till now, and we had already been
accused of being ³spartan² by our critics. We found that certain melodies
immediately took on a sappy character as soon as we so much as used the
third of the chord in the wrong place. But if we played, say, only octaves,
a beautiful lean and powerful emotional energy was released from the melody.
At times you can hear basic harmonies played in the accompaniment on the
wedding cd, and at other times you will hear only single notes or octaves.
The choices were made on the basis of our emotional response, and not by a
striving toward ³authenticity² for its own sake. In fact however, the
written accompaniment of the Unter der Khupe, which is a related genre and
was notated in situ by Moshe Bick at a Moldavian Jewish wedding, also used
only octaves in the accompaniment, and this fact supported us in our
decision to restrain ourselves while arranging the music. My late
composition private composition teacher, Hugo Norden, olav ha shulem, was
very clear about this artistic principle: The more restrictions you put upon
yourself as an artist, the more freedom you have. The biggest danger you
face as an artist is the endless sea of choices you can choose from at any
given moment. Confine your field of possibilities and you will still have
too many choices. Confine it even more and your selection process becomes
concentrated into an essence. Stravinsky said the same thing in different
words. Having studied intensively with the South African pianist and
homeopathist, Alain Naudé, I understood this releasing of energy as similar
to the process of trituration, whereby a substance is diluted exponentially,
until so little of it is left that it¹s healing energy is released.
Substitute ³emotional² for ³healing² and the same process can be found in
music.

To describe the details and problems of reconstruction would take too long,
but one deserves mention: In the writings of the Jewish Ukrainian
musicologist Moshe Beregovski of the 1930s, it is mentioned that one
constant characteristic which he noticed in the kale bazetsns he had
observed in the Ukraine, namely that the vocal parts were always in Mogen
Ovos (scalar form: D E F G A Bb C D), whereby the instrumental interludes
were always in the Freygish mode (scalar form: D Eb F# G A Bb C D). The fact
that Majer¹s example came from his Polish town of Piotrkow-Tribunalski would
not have made us more vigilant, because all of the kale bazetsns we had
observed up to this point, regardless of region, showed the same
characteristics Beregovsky noticed. But this was not the case in Majer¹s
example. The vocal and instrumental portions were uni-modal. This raised
important musicological questions concerning regional differences of the
repertoire, which had hitherto been assumed to be fairly uniform as regards
the core repertoire of the East European Jews. Was the modal difference in
Majer¹s example the exception which proves the rule, or was there in fact
regional variance of the ritual portions of the wedding, and were these
differences by analogy present in the overall repertoire throughout all of
the klezmer regions?

For most people playing this music, such questions seem of a strictly
musicological nature. Budowitz has unwittingly but gladly been the center of
debates about retrogressive vs. progressive in contemporary music circles,
but mostly because we figured that controversy was always a form of
promotion, be it good or bad. Yet I don¹t think anyone could claim that a
revival which uses 78 r.p.m records or printed examples by Ukrainian
musicologists from the 1930s as sources for pop-jazz-klezmer mixes are any
more modern than one that uses living sources of genres never before heard
on record in complete form in a traditional (and often conjectural) style.
In fact, to date no members of the current revival have presented the
complete former ritual aspects of Klezmer music on record, often for the
simple reason that noone has been sure how they are supposed to sound in
their entirety, and perhaps also because it is quite a risky thing to do,
perhaps comparable to European folk band presenting a Kyrie and Gloria for
half of a record. Aside from a handful of 78 r.p.m. theatrical satires and
some scant pre-war written sources, no models have been unearthed which have
given present-day klezmer music practitioners a model by which they can feel
comfortable to stretch the limits of these forms through modern renditions.
Without the original model of a genre, musicians will not venture to build
contemporaneously upon it. How could they? As regards the kale bazingns,
where only satires could be heard on record, the problem has even been as
crass as deciphering what is satire and what is not in the texts and music;
or determining whether  part of the text sung to the bride is filler for the
recording or genuine traditional fare? And do the musicians really start and
stop in a recitativo secco manner, or do they play a continuous blanket of
slowly changing chords in the background, like the doina, which some believe
eventually ³replaced² the entire kale badekns ritual? Are the interludes
always played in Freygish while the sung parts are in Mogen Ovos as
Beregovsky writes, and does the clarinet or the violin play them? How long
does the whole thing go on? And why did it ever die out? Can we revive it
and will it stand reworking or is it a form which has had its day and will
never again find relevance, even when severed completely from its original
function?

When we embarked on this project of condensing the basic form of an entire
wedding into one coherent CD, we had no idea how beautiful and complete the
entire form was, when all that was left was the musical elements of the old
style wedding. It¹s as though we discovered a huge symphonic form which
showed far more complexity and emotional range than even the average
symphony. Usually, when planning a recording, you do think of the entire
sequence of pieces as a whole, and try to lead the listener logically
through the entire recording, though everyone knows that people rarely take
the time to listen to an entire record in one sitting. These decisions,
however, are usually based upon abstract musical criteriae and not
functional ones such as tempo, tension and release, sometimes keys, etc. I
remember Alicia Svigals mentioning how difficult it was for her to determine
the sequencing of her wonderful CD Fidl. One version showed too many
consecutive tracks in the same keys, but when she changed that, there were
too many slow pieces, etc. Like my Zeyde used to say in one of his pithy
moments when criticizing cosmetic surgery: "Fix the nose and the mouth don't
work." But in the Budowitz case, the main problem was first finding the
sequence of the old Yiddish weddings as they once were. And once we found
that, we had no idea how emotionally and formally complex the entire
construct was. Until we heard what we were doing ourselves. The fact that
the entire ritual portion was in one basic key didn't seem to weaken
anything. We dispensed with the idea that you have to change keys to sustain
musical interest. It wasn't applicable here.

Of course the experience of a wedding and that of a recording are two
completely different things. As soon as you take music out of its original
context, you have changed it, whether you choose to do it on a stage, a
recording or elsewhere. This is reason enough to make no pretense of being
³authentic² in spite of the favor that term finds among our listeners and
critics. Rather than deal with that superficial semantic problem, we have
decided to view and present the music here as a complete work in and of
itself, a work which makes use of as many of the musical characteristics of
the old Jewish wedding as possible within our knowledge. Closer we can¹t
come. In simpler terms, we¹re simply following the instructions of the
badkhn himself when he implores at the beginning of the khosn bazingns, ³Oh,
my brother's klezmorim, play for the bridegroom before the khupa, just as it
used to be in the days of our holy Forefathers...²

Josh Horowitz

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