The Book Of Klezmer

Originally published in hardcover in 2002.

Another great addition to the Avrahm Galper Clarinet Series, here Avrahm presents 42 fantastic Klezmer tunes to add to your repertoire. All arranged for clarinet and B-Flat instruments in easy to read notation, all on single pages to avoid awkward page turns. Intermediate in difficulty.

Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory is the first comprehensive study of the musical structure and social history of klezmer music, the music of the Jewish musicians' guild of Eastern Europe. Emerging in 16th century Prague, the klezmer became a central cultural feature of the largest transnational Jewish community of modern times - the Ashkenazim of Eastern Europe. Much of the musical and choreographic history of the Ashkenazim is embedded in the klezmer repertoire, which functioned as a kind of non-verbal communal memory. The complex of speech, dance, and musical gesture is deeply rooted in Jewish expressive culture, and reached its highest development in Eastern Europe. Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory reveals the artistic transformations of the liturgy of the Ashkenazic synagogue in klezmer wedding melodies, and presents the most extended study available in any language of the relationship of Jewish dance to the rich and varied klezmer music of Eastern Europe. Author Walter Zev Feldman expertly examines the major written sources--principally in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Romanian--from the 16th to the 20th centuries. He draws upon the foundational notated collections of the late Tsarist and early Soviet periods, as well as rare cantorial and klezmer manuscripts from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. He has conducted interviews with authoritative European-born klezmorim over a period of more than thirty years, in America, Europe, and Israel. Thus, his analysis reveals both the musical and cultural systems underlying the klezmer music of Eastern Europe.

This is a story of survival against all odds, of a musical legacy so potent it can still be heard, despite assimilation and near annihilation. The scratchy, distant sound of early recordings bursts forth with such power that they have formed the soundtrack for an entirely new generation of performers, Jew and non-Jew alike, who have embraced and expanded the klezmer tradition. Through stories, pictures, and a companion CD, this book introduces this most vital musical form to new and old fans alike.

Shpil offers an expansive history of klezmer, from its medieval origins through the present era. Individual chapters concentrate on the most common instruments found in a typical klezmer ensemble: violin, clarinet, accordion, bass, percussion, and even voice. Contributors incl...

"Klezmer" is a Yiddish word for professional folk instrumentalist-the flutist, fiddler, and bass player that made brides weep and guests dance at weddings throughout Jewish eastern Europe before the culture was destroyed in the Holocaust, silenced under Stalin, and lost out to assimilation in America. Klezmer music is now experiencing a tremendous new spurt of interest worldwide with both Jews and non-Jews recreating this restless volatile, and vibrant musical culture. Firmly centered in the United States, klezmer has paradoxically moved back across the Atlantic as a distinctly "American" music, played throughout central and eastern Europe, as well as in many other parts of the world. Fiddler on the Move places klezmer music squarely within American music studies, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology. Neither a chronology nor a comprehensive survey, the book describes a variety of approaches and perspectives for coming to terms with the highly diverse array of activities found under the klezmer umbrella. Bringing to his subject the insights of an accomplished ethnomusicologist, Slobin addresses such questions as: How does klezmer overlap with, and differ from, the many other contemporary "heritage" musics based on an assumed connection with a group identity and links to a tradition? How do economics, artistic expression, and the evocation of the past interact in motivating klezmer performers and audiences? In what kinds of environment does klezmer flourish? How do stylistic features such as genre, form, and ornamentation help to define the technique, affect, and aesthetic of klezmer? Featuring a music CD with many of the archival and contemporary recordings discussed in the text, this fascinating study will interest scholars, students, musicians, and music lovers

The music of clarinetists Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras is iconic of American klezmer music. Their legacy has had an enduring impact on the development of the popular world music genre.

Klezmer is a continually evolving musical tradition that grows out of Eastern European Jewish culture, and its changes reflect Jews' interaction with other groups as well as their shifting relations to their own history. But what happens when, in the klezmer spirit, the performances that go into the making of Jewishness come into contact with those that build different forms of cultural identity? Jonathan Freedman argues that terms central to the Jewish experience in America, notions like "the immigrant," the "ethnic," and even the "model minority," have worked and continue to intertwine the Jewish-American with the experiences, histories, and imaginative productions of Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and gays and lesbians, among others. He traces these relationships in a number of arenas: the crossover between jazz and klezmer and its consequences in Philip Roth's The Human Stain; the relationship between Jewishness and queer identity in Tony Kushner's Angels in America; fictions concerning crypto-Jews in Cuba and the Mexican-American borderland; the connection between Jews and Christian apocalyptic narratives; stories of "new immigrants" by Bharathi Mukherjee, Gish Jen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Gary Shteyngart; and the revisionary relation of these authors to the classic Jewish American immigrant narratives of Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. By interrogating the fraught and multidimensional uses of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness, Freedman deepens our understanding of ethnoracial complexities.