Re: 'Israeli' folk dancing--and folk music

[music <music...>]

>What is "Israeli dancing", anyway, but re-packaged Yiddish dancing?

As others have advised, Israeli dancing isn't re-packaged Yiddish dancing
at all!  Rather, its own, invented subculture--drawing on other cultures,
to be sure, though I'm not sure "Yiddish dancing" was one of them at all!

>(At least, no one here has the _khutspe_ to call it "Israeli folk
dancing"!)

Sorry!--I most certainly *would* call it Israeli folk dancing--just as the
created body of Shirei Eretz Yisrael constitute a (created) folk music.
(As it happens, I just talked about this at a Yom Ha'atzmaut lecture last
night.)

I wonder if Lee is speaking from an older, I think 19th-century German
conception of folk music, discredited in many folk music circles, of "folk
music" as necessarily:  a) old, b) of uncertain/unknown/anonymous origin,
and c) transmitted only orally, by word of mouth.

*Many*--from Norm Cohen, who wrote the liner notes for the Smithsonian's
collection of Ameican folk music, to Pete Seeger, to Theodore Bikel (see
his liner notes on his classic SONGS OF ISRAEL--folk songs every one of
them), to (on a more modest level, to be sure), your humble correspondent
(see, for that matter, *my* liner notes to OPEN THE GATES!  NEW AMERICAN-
JEWISH MUSIC FOR PRAYER, VOL. 1)--find this conception of folk music--and,
I would assume by reasonable parallel, of what is and is not "folk" dancing-
-antiquated and almost entirely useless.

Rather, to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart (discoursing, to
be sure, about another subject), you know folk music when you hear it--or,
rather, when you hear and see how people--folks--are *using* and relating
to it.  Is "The Hammer Song" ("If I Had a Hammer") a folk song?  Is "This
Land Is Your Land" a folk song?  Is "Oifn Pripichek" (I guess I should
really call it Der Aleph-Beys [sp?]) a folk song?  Is Rozinkes mit Mandlen
a folk song?  Of course all of these--selected from just two possible
traditions--are, as is "Erev Shel Shoshanim" and "Dodi Li".  All of these
had known composers and known times of composition (in some cases, known
*dates* of composition), but they're all folk songs.

Just like the *dance* to "Erev Ba"--and to "Dayagim" and "Dodi Li" and, of
course, scores of others--are folk dances.

Just ask--or watch (or listen to, depending) the folk.

--Robert Cohen



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