Bohlman Folk Songs of Ashkenaz book

[SamWeiss <SamWeiss...>]

I came across a notice of this interesting (but pricey) book, and I don't 
remember it being discussed on this list.  Has anybody read it? 
(Publisher's info at the bottom.)

The Folk Songs of the Ashkenaz
Edited by Phillip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel
OT 6 ISBN 0-89579-474-8 (2001) x +180 pp. $80.00

The Folk Songs of Ashkenaz dramatically transforms our understanding of 
music in the daily lives of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe by 
documenting a five-century interaction between Jewish communities in which 
German, Yiddish, and their dialects were spoken as vernacular 
languages.  Editors Philip Bohlman of the University of Chicago and Otto 
Holzapfel of the German Folk-Song Archive have searched through collections 
throughout Europe, North America, and Israel to gather a rich treasure of 
songs and their variants, which together reveal that contact between Jewish 
communities in the Ashkenazic diaspora was extensive and complex.  Equally 
important is the documentation of exchange between Jewish communities and 
their non-Jewish neighbors, an exchange that clearly shows that the Jewish 
presence in European society before the holocaust was greater than many 
have previously assumed.

As revealed by songs such as the German ballad "The Count from Rome," 
published here in a sixteenth-century printed version in Hebrew characters 
representing a Middle High German text, Jewish musicians, publishers, and 
consumers were actively involved in the formation of European culture 
already on the eve of modernity.  This critical edition also contains songs 
that help us understand essential Jewish contributions to twentieth-century 
modernism, for example, through the stage of the Viennese Jewish 
cabaret.  One of the most crucial contributions of The Folk Songs of 
Ashkenaz is the way in which the Jewish folk songs it contain help us 
understand individual lives and the contributions of individuals to the 
historical moments in which they lived.

With each song and variant, the editors have sought to uncover as much as 
possible about the singer and the cultural milieu in which she or he 
lived.  By no means is the volume primarily a reflection on the past, for 
the editors strive to connect the songs to living traditions, not least 
among them the revivals of Yiddish song and klezmer that emerged in the 
1990s, again uniting Central and Eastern Europe, the two worlds joined by 
the folk songs of Ashkenaz.
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