Re: Jankowski Tsimbl / Alcock Sticks

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

"Peter Rushefsky" <rushefsky_p (at) univerahealthcare(dot)org> wrote:

Paul-- you don't think the tsimblist Steiner plays with is using padded sticks? 
To me Steiner's tsimbler has a more muted sound than the Rzeszow players I've
heard.  Maybe they were padded with leather instead of cotton.

Could be---the problem there is that the record is scratchy (and I've 
even got two 78s of one of them). The record is acoustical, which 
makes it hard to hear much. Same with the Leibowitz-Silver Emerson 78.
Maybe I'm dreaming right now, but it seems to me that the Yankowitz-
Goldberg recordings use unpadded hammers. As my father bought a 
secondhand Romanian or Moldavian tsimbl from Blank Brothers in 1940, 
that is pretty good evidence that there was at least one Jewish 
player from those areas (besides Moskowitz, unless Moskowitz sold it 
to Blank) in New York City, and he would have used padded sticks. 
I've got a pair of Ukrainian sticks where the ends have rubber from a 
car tire. But still the customary type in Galicia and old Lithuania 
would be sticks unwrapped at the ends. See the diagram in I. D. 
Nazina, _Belarusskie muzychny instrumenty_ (or some such title) 
(Minsk, 1982), for the traditional (not post-1930s conservatory 
variety, which, incidentally, had some klezmer involvement) style. 

Maybe a mid-19th century Moldavian klezmer custom might have been to 
wrap little rags around the ends. I say this because I once saw, in 
the Istanbul bazaar, a 19th-century santur with hammers that were 
fairly short, resembling Ukrainian ones more or less, but with cotton 
cloth wrapped around the ends (see a UNESCO-Barenreiter LP, 
"Turkey," which has a picture of the sticks used on the instrument 
in that recording---now extinct). Supposedly the Turks adopted this 
instrument from Moldavian Jews around 1850, it could be 
that was the preferred custom at that time, and that the current 
style used in Romania and Greece came in from Hungary at a later 
time (the Turkish santur also resembles the Ukrainian instrument 
more than the Romanian one, so it could be that the changes in 
design to the Romanian one came in the late 19th century).

Then the alternative would be to use both padded and unpadded 
sticks, like most Hungarian Gypsies, though the padded variety is 
standard.  

Paul Gifford

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