Re: Similar Jewish & Greek tunes

[Seth Austen <seth...>]

on 1/10/01 8:08 PM, Paul M. Gifford at PGIFFORD (at) flint(dot)umich(dot)edu 
wrote:

> I'm prompted to bring this topic up again. I was listening to
> Joel Rubin's _Oystres_ CD and recognized a tune, played by a
> Russian group (though I didn't look to see which one), and
> recognized it as the same as a 1920s Columbia 78 of Peter Mamakos
> playing "Itia," I think. I knew a Gypsy violinist in Detroit (who,
> incidentally had played at a resort in the Catskills for a long time)
> who once broke into that same tune, and called it "Greek."
> 
> Anyway, there are lots of others. I know Martin Schwartz is interested
> in this, and discussed it in his notes to the Folk-Lyric LP. I'm bad
> at remembering names, but I've recognized lots of other similarities,
> also with tunes identified as Ukrainian or Russian (an Apolsky's
> Ukrainian Orchestra 78 on Victor comes to mind----could be a Jewish
> group, though). Some day I'm going to have to sit down and try to
> sort the recordings out.

Hello Paul,

I've been on a Greek bouzouki music kick recently, and have been buying
various reissues of 1930s-50s bouzouki music and Rembetic songs, and
transcribing and learning tunes. In one of my other, non-klezmer musical
lives, I play the Irish bouzouki (a flat backed octave mandolin hybrid
instrument tuned GDAD) both for Celtic music and also international folk
dance music. I've noticed a number of Greek tunes, or parts of them, that
are pretty close or identical to some klezmer tunes. Like yourself, I'd have
to spend some time going back through my transcriptions to see what
similarities I've bumped into, I know so many tunes that I'm not always
completely sure of which part of what tune came from where, I just know that
I've heard it before. I will certainly keep you posted on what I find in
this regard, and I look forward to hearing your findings as well.

All the best,

Seth

-- 
Seth Austen

http://www.sethausten.com
email; seth (at) sethausten(dot)com


"Music is far, far older than our species. It is tens of millions of years
old, and the fact that animals as wildly divergent as whales, humans and
birds come out with similar laws for what they compose suggests to me that
there are a finite number of musical sounds that will entertain the
vertebrate brain." 

              Roger Payne, president of Ocean Alliance, quoted in NY Times

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