RE: Shlomo Carlebach/Giora Feidman

[music <music...>]

Sam wrote:

> Of course: Someone who is immersed in a language, a tradition, an
> artform, etc. can create a meaningful expression in that form without 
> preparation.  Someone who is not, has to be pretty lucky to pull that 
> off.  I think even Woody Guthrie would go along with that.

Instead of "lucky," say, I would suggest, "inspired."  The mysterious,
awesome gift of melody does not, I suspect, necessarily depend on
having been immersed in a particular musical tradition--though I also
suspect that most composers of folk music and spiritual or "heart
music" melodies are undoubtedly enriched and enabled to the extent
that they are immersed in the music of their tradition or style.  You
learn to write well by reading well-written prose; I suspect that you
create beautiful melodies in part as a response to listening to beautiful
melodies.  Certainly Shlomo immersed himself in Hassidic music, for
example.  But I don't know if it's required--because I don't understand
the wellsprings of that mysterious gift of melody.  Does anyone?
 
> My point was that there is something very wrong with bypassing the
> teaching of a lot of repertoire specific to a style and expecting a student to
> be "instantly" creative in that style.  In another age and time such a
> teacher might have been called a charlatan. 

I think we've gone a little off course here, because a charlatan is (American
Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition) "a person who makes elaborate, fraudulent,
and often voluble claims to skill or knowledge."  That may or may not apply
to some of the rabbis and cantors of whom Sam speaks; I wasn't, and am 
not, speaking to that.  But it doesn't apply to inspired melodists or niggun
writers.  They're not making any claims of any kind.  They just have a gift
which they're sharing.  That gift might, again, perhaps be deepened and 
enriched by exposure to other music, but it remains a gift--one that can 
indeed "bypass" learning a repertoire, etc.  Music, as Leonard Bernstein 
put it, makes a direct hit on the emotions; and composing melodies may 
similarly bypass, at least some of the time, intellectual/"teaching"/learning 
channels.

--Robert Cohen 

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