Re: Klezmer clarinet lessons

[Dawid & Moericke <khupe...>]

> Most will come in and want me to teach them a tune on the first
> lesson, thinking they can by pass a lot of practice and pedagogy,
> just because they feel that the music is somehow "easier"
> than classical music. [?]
> So my advice is this if you have a clarinet student that wants to learn how to
> play Klezmer, have them buy the Naftule Brandwien King of Klezmer CD, or the
> Dave Tarras one that's in every Borders, and learn a tune from it.


Good idea, Tom. I think many of us share that experience, but personally I'm
grateful that so many people are interested in learning klezmer music!
Misunderstandings belong to the process of learning, and it's our task as
teachers to correct them.
Sometimes teaching can be frustrating, that's right. It's hard when
accomplished musicians ask you to show them how to fake klezmer music in
thirty minutes. There's not much use in that, and professionals, or
professionals-to-be, should know better. Well, if they don't, we can tell
them!

Two more remarks:

1. It comes as no surprise that musically less experienced people think of
klezmer music as "easier" to learn. It's seems emotionally easily
accessible, so why is it hard to learn, when I understand it so well?
As long as classical music is regarded high arts, and folk music not, how
can one guess that a simple nign is exactly as difficult to play as a simple
Mozart tune? Easy to produce the notes, difficult to express the emotional
quality. Easy to enter the emotional level, hard to translate it
instrumentally.

2. Is a Brandwein/Tarras CD really the best choice?
I get the idea of 'learning from the best', but for learning some tunes to
start with, that's a pretty tough choice. Sure, you cannot learn the music
without its sound and vibe, but, at least for beginners, it's hard to get
the musical message when starting with highly virtuoso historical
recordings. When I listened to my first Brandwein recording, I found it
highly fascinating, but also very, very weird. It took me a long time to
extract the actual musical message from that confusingly complex sensation
of sound, texture and noteyness (if I managed at all to this very day) and I
was already a serious clarinetist with some experience in diverging styles.
We can't recommend all these great recordings enough, and for professionals
they might make the right choice rightaway. For less accomplished players
who first have to get a sense of klezmer, they're wonderful and important to
listen to and get the taste, but hard to learn tunes from, let alone copy
the playing. It makes some sense, but it also causes frustration.
Well, there's plenty of frustration in there for klezmer professionals as
well, speaking of myself... ;-)

What I like to do, is play some simple nigunim and khusidlekh for beginning
students, and have them tape it. That way they can learn immediately from
their teacher. I'm not as good as Brandwein, but I'm a living person and can
explain and discuss my stuff and put it in today's contexts.
There's another advantage: klezmer beginners often want to focus on
ornamentation a lot, that's what's most attractive first, but not the best
element to get into the right klezmer 'feel'. So when I play for beginning
students, it allows me to focus more on rhythm and phrasing than on
ornamentation, more on a singing quality than on virtuosity.

Christian Dawid



By the way, I don't think Stravinsky wanted to write 'authentic' ragtime, as
much as Bartok didn't want to write folk music. (Which he undoubtedly could
have done.)

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