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

[Eliott Kahn <Elkahn...>]

Congratulations to you Josh on your musical curiosity and your astounding 
scholarship. I look forward to hearing this recording!

Eliott Kahn


At 11:49 AM 6/2/00 +0000, you wrote:
>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
>

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