Klezmer () is an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for listening; these would have been played at weddings and other social functions. The musical genre incorporated elements of many other musical genres including Ottoman (especially Greek and Romanian) music, Baroque music, German and Slavic folk dances, and religious Jewish music. As the music arrived in the United States, it lost some of its traditional ritual elements and adopted elements of American big band and popular music. Among the European-born klezmers who popularized the genre in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s were Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein; they were followed by American-born musicians such as Max Epstein, Sid Beckerman and Ray Musiker.

After the destruction of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, and a general fall in the popularity of klezmer music in the United States, the music began to be popularized again in the late 1970s in the so-called Klezmer Revival. By the 1980s and 1990s the American revival spread to Europe and inspired a new interest in the genre in places such as Germany, France, Poland and Russia. A parallel tradition has also continued in Israel with such figures as Moussa Berlin.

Etymology and usage

The term , as used in the Yiddish language, has a Hebrew etymology: klei, meaning "tools, utensils or instruments of" and zemer, "melody"; leading to k'lei zemer , meaning "musical instruments". Previously the musician may have been referred to as a () or other terms. After the term became the preferred term for these professional musicians in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, other types of musicians were more commonly known as or . Twentieth-century Russian scholars sometimes used the term "klezmer"; Ivan Lipaev did not use it, but Moisei Beregovsky did when publishing in Yiddish or Ukrainian. During that time, through metonymy it came to refer not only to the musician but to the musical genre they played, a meaning which it had not had in Yiddish. Early 20th century recording industry materials and other writings had referred to it as Hebrew, Jewish, or Yiddish dance music, or sometimes using the Yiddish term Freilech music ("Cheerful music"). The term 'klezmer' to refer to a genre of music was popularized as a marketing term in the late 1970s by Revival bands; Walter Zev Feldman, whose 1979 LP with Andy Statman used the term, claims credit for this shift in usage.

Musical elements

Style

The traditional style of playing klezmer music, including tone, typical cadences, and ornamentation, sets it apart from other genres. Although klezmer music emerged from a larger Eastern European Jewish musical culture that included Jewish cantorial music, Hasidic Niguns, and later Yiddish theatre music, it also borrowed from the surrounding folk musics of Central and Eastern Europe and from cosmopolitan European musical forms. Therefore it evolved into an overall style which has recognizable elements from all of those other genres.

Few klezmer musicians before the late nineteenth century had conservatory musical training, but they generally learned through apprenticeship and inherited a rich tradition with its own advanced musical techniques. Each musician had their understanding of how the style should be "correctly" performed. Among those stylistic elements that are considered typically "Jewish" in klezmer music are those which are shared with cantorial or Hasidic vocal ornaments, including imitations of sighing or laughing. Various Yiddish terms were used for these vocal-like ornaments such as (Krekhts, "groan" or "moan"), (, "wrinkle" or "fold"), and (, "pressure" or "stress"). pedal notes, mordents, slides and typical klezmer cadences are also important to the style. Unlike in Classical music, vibrato is used sparingly, and is treated as another type of ornament.

Historical repertoire

The repertoire of klezmer musicians was very diverse and tied to specific social functions and dances, especially of the traditional wedding. Depending on the location this basic dance may also have been called a (circle), , , (round dance, literally the Belarusian translation of the Russian khorovod), , , etc.

  • (kosher dance) or (mitzvah dance) are ritual dances dating back hundreds of years, often in and borrowing the form and melodies of a polonaise or a gavotte. A is a related type of dance which involves pantomimes of anger and reconciliation.
  • There were a variety of non-metrical, semi-improvised listening genres. The best known is the borrowed from the Romanian doina.
  • Forms centering on bridal rituals, including the (seating of the bride) or (singing to the bride). In these freeform pieces the would sing to the bride as the soloist accompanied with a freeform piece.
  • Other types of listening music borrowed from the forms and melodies of neighboring cultures, either from folk melodies or non-Jewish dances. A is a type of virtuosic solo piece in in an Ottoman or "oriental" style, and melodies may incorporate references to Greek Hasapiko into an Ashkenazic musical aesthetic.

Orchestration

Klezmer music is an instrumental tradition, without much of a history of songs or singing. In Eastern Europe, Klezmers did traditionally accompany the vocal stylings of the Badchen (wedding entertainer), although their performances were typically improvised couplets and the calling of ceremonies rather than songs. (The importance of the Badchen gradually decreased by the twentieth century, although they still continued in some traditions.)

As for the klezmer orchestra, its size and composition varied by time and place. The klezmer bands of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were small, with roughly three to five musicians playing woodwind or string instruments. In the mid-nineteenth century, the clarinet started to appear in those small Klezmer ensembles as well. In Ukraine, by the last decades of the century the orchestras had grown larger, averaging seven to twelve members; incorporating brass instruments and up to twenty performers for a prestigious occasion. (However, for poor weddings a large klezmer ensemble might only send three or four of its junior members. In Galicia, and Belarus, the smaller string ensemble with cimbalom remained the norm into the twentieth century. Modern klezmer instrumentation is more commonly influenced by the instruments of the 19th-century military bands than the earlier orchestras.

Percussion in early 20th-century klezmer recordings was generally minimal—no more than a wood block or snare drum. In Eastern Europe, percussion was often provided by a drummer who played a frame drum, or poyk, sometimes called baraban. A poyk is similar to a bass drum and often has a cymbal or piece of metal mounted on top, which is struck by a beater or a small cymbal strapped to the hand.

Melodic modes

Western, Cantorial, and Ottoman music terminology

Klezmer music is a genre that developed partly in the Western musical tradition but also in the Ottoman Empire, and is primarily an oral tradition which does not have a well-established literature to explain its modes and modal progression. Many of its melodies do not fit well in the major and minor terminology used in Western music, nor is the music systematically microtonal in the way that Middle Eastern music is. The terms used in Yiddish for these modes include nusach (); (), "manner, mode of life", which describes the typical melodic character, important notes and scale; and (), a word meaning "taste" which was commonly used by Moisei Beregovsky.

Beregovsky, who was writing in the Stalinist era and was constrained by having to downplay klezmer's religious aspects, did not use the terminology of synagogue modes, except in early work in 1929. Instead, he relied on German-inspired musical terminology of major, minor, and "other" modes, which he described in technical terms. In his 1940s works he noted that the majority of the klezmer repertoire seemed to be in a minor key, whether natural minor or others, that around a quarter of the material was in Freygish, and that around a fifth of the repertoire was in a major key. This approach dates back to Idelsohn in the early twentieth century, who was very familiar with Middle Eastern music, and has been developed in the past decade by Joshua Horowitz. Another problem in listing these terms as simple eight-note (octatonic) scales is that it makes it harder to see how Klezmer melodic structures can work as five-note pentachords, how parts of different modes typically interact, and what the cultural significance of a given mode might be in a traditional Klezmer context.

thumb|Mogen Ovos mode in C

  • is a synagogue mode which resembles the Western natural minor.

History

Europe

Development of the genre

The Bible has several descriptions of orchestras and Levites making music, but after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, many rabbis discouraged musical instruments. Therefore, while there may have been Jewish musicians in different times and places since then, the concept of a "Klezmer" musician arose much more recently. The earliest written record of the use of the word was identified by as being in a Jewish council meeting from Kraków in 1595. They may have existed even earlier in Prague, as references to them have been found as early as 1511 and 1533. It was in the 1600s that the situation of Jewish musicians in Poland improved, as they gained the right to form Guilds (Khevre), and therefore to set their own fees, hire Christians, and so on. Therefore over time this new form of professional musician developed new forms of music and elaborated this tradition across a wide area of Eastern European Jewish life. The rise of Hasidic Judaism in the late eighteenth century and onwards also contributed to the development of klezmer, due to their emphasis on dancing and wordless melodies as a component of Jewish practice. Among these figures were Aron-Moyshe Kholodenko "Pedotser", Yosef Drucker "Stempenyu", Alter Goyzman "Alter Chudnover" and Josef Gusikov.

Unlike in the United States, where there was a robust Klezmer recording industry, there was relatively less klezmer recorded in Europe in the early twentieth century. The majority of European recordings of Jewish music consisted of Cantorial and Yiddish Theatre music, with only a few dozen known to exist of Klezmer music. These include violin pieces by artists such as Oscar Zehngut, Jacob Gegna, H. Steiner, Leon Ahl, and Josef Solinski; flute pieces by S. Kosch, and ensemble recordings by Belf's Romanian Orchestra, the Russian-Jewish Orchestra, Jewish Wedding Orchestra, and Titunshnayder's Orchestra.

Klezmer in the late Russian empire and Soviet era

The loosening of restrictions on Jews in the Russian Empire, and their newfound access to academic and conservatory training, created a class of scholars who began to reexamine and evaluate klezmer using modern techniques. There was also new interest in collecting and studying Jewish music and folklore, including Yiddish songs, folk tales, and instrumental music. An early expedition was by Joel Engel, who collected folk melodies in his birthplace of Berdyansk in 1900. The first figure to collect large amounts of klezmer music was Susman Kiselgof, who made several expeditions to the Pale of Settlement from 1907 to 1915. He was soon followed by other scholars such as Moisei Beregovsky and Sofia Magid, Soviet scholars of Yiddish and klezmer music. Most of the materials collected in those expeditions are now held by the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.

thumb|right|Klezmer musicians at a wedding, Ukraine,

Beregovsky, writing in the late 1930s, lamented how little scholars knew about the range of playing technique and social context of Klezmers from past eras, except for the late nineteenth century which could be investigated through elderly musicians who still remembered it. After 1948, Soviet Jewish culture entered a phase of repression, meaning that Jewish music concerts, whether tied to Hebrew, Yiddish, or instrumental klezmer, were no longer allowed to be performed. Moisei Beregovsky's academic work was shut down in 1949 and he was arrested and deported to Siberia in 1951. The repression was eased in the mid-1950s as some Jewish and Yiddish performances were allowed to return to the stage once again. However, the main venue for klezmer has always been traditional community events and weddings, not the concert stage or academic institute; those traditional venues were repressed along with Jewish culture in general, according to anti-religious Soviet policy.

United States

Early American klezmer (1880s–1910s)

The first klezmers to arrive in the United States followed the first large waves of Eastern European Jewish immigration which began after 1880, establishing themselves mainly in large cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Some of them found work in restaurants, dance halls, union rallies, wine cellars, and other modern venues in places like New York's Lower East Side. But the major source of income for klezmer musicians seems to have remained weddings and Simchas, as in Europe.

Big band klezmer orchestras (1910s–1920s)

thumb|Max Leibowitz orchestra from 1921

The vitality of the Jewish music industry in major American cities attracted ever more klezmers from Europe in the 1910s. This coincided with the development of the recording industry, which recorded a number of these klezmer orchestras. By the time of the First World War, the industry turned its attention to ethnic dance music and a number of bandleaders were hired by record companies such as Edison Records, Emerson Records, Okeh Records, and the Victor Recording Company to record 78 rpm discs. The first of these was Abe Elenkrig, a barber and cornet player from a klezmer family in Ukraine whose 1913 recording (From the Wedding) has been recognized by the Library of Congress.

Among the European-born klezmers recording during that decade were some from the Ukrainian territory of the Russian Empire (Abe Elenkrig, Dave Tarras, Shloimke Beckerman, Joseph Frankel, and Israel J. Hochman), some from Austro-Hungarian Galicia (Naftule Brandwein, Harry Kandel and Berish Katz), and some from Romania (Abe Schwartz, Max Leibowitz, Max Yankowitz, Joseph Moskowitz).

The mid-1920s also saw a number of popular novelty "Klezmer" groups which performed on the radio or vaudeville stages. These included Joseph Cherniavsky's Yiddish-American Jazz Band, whose members would dress as parodies of Cossacks or Hasidim. Another such group was the Boibriker Kapelle, which performed on the radio and in concerts trying to recreate a nostalgic, old-fashioned Galician Klezmer sound. With the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924, which greatly restricted Jewish immigration from Europe, and then the onset of the Great Depression by 1930, the market for Yiddish and klezmer recordings in the United States saw a steep decline, which essentially ended the recording careers of many of the popular bandleaders of the 1910s and 1920s, and made the large klezmer orchestra less viable.

Celebrity clarinetists

Along with the rise of klezmer "big bands" in the 1910s and 1920s, a handful of Jewish clarinet players who had led those bands became celebrities in their own right, with a legacy that lasted into subsequent decades. The most popular among these were Naftule Brandwein, Dave Tarras, and Shloimke Beckerman.

Klezmer revival

In the 1970s there was a renewal of interest in Klezmer music centered primarily in the United States. Notable early figures and groups were Giora Feidman, The Klezmorim, Walter Zev Feldman, Andy Statman, and the Klezmer Conservatory Band. They drew their repertoire from recordings and surviving musicians of U.S. klezmer. In particular, clarinetists such as Dave Tarras and Max Epstein became mentors to this new generation of klezmer musicians. In 1985, Henry Sapoznik and Adrienne Cooper founded KlezKamp to teach klezmer and other Yiddish music.

thumb|Elane Hoffman Watts, klezmer drummer, in 2007

The 1980s saw a second wave of revival, as interest grew in more traditionally inspired performances with string instruments, largely with non-Jews of the United States and Germany. Musicians began to track down older European klezmer by listening to recordings, finding transcriptions, and making field recordings of the few klezmorim left in Eastern Europe. Key performers in this style are Joel Rubin, Budowitz, Khevrisa, Di Naye Kapelye, Yale Strom, The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble, The Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, the violinists Alicia Svigals, Steven Greenman, Cookie Segelstein and Elie Rosenblatt, flutist Adrianne Greenbaum, and tsimbl player Pete Rushefsky. Bands like Brave Old World, Hot Pstromi and The Klezmatics also emerged during this period.

In the 1990s, musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area helped further interest in klezmer music by taking it into new territory. Groups such as the New Klezmer Trio inspired a new wave of bands merging klezmer with other forms of music, such as John Zorn's Masada and Bar Kokhba, Naftule's Dream, Don Byron's Mickey Katz project and violinist Daniel Hoffman's klezmer/jazz/Middle-Eastern fusion band Davka. also formed in 1991 with a mixture of New Orleans funk, jazz, and klezmer styles.

Starting in 2008, "The Other Europeans" project, funded by several EU cultural institutions, spent a year doing intensive field research in the region of Moldavia under the leadership of Alan Bern and scholar Zev Feldman. They wanted to explore klezmer and lăutari roots, and fuse the music of the two "other European" groups. The resulting band now performs internationally.

A separate klezmer tradition had developed in Israel in the 20th century. Clarinetists Moshe Berlin and Avrum Leib Burstein are known exponents of the klezmer style in Israel. To preserve and promote klezmer music in Israel, Burstein founded the Jerusalem Klezmer Association, which has become a center for learning and performance of klezmer music in the country.

thumb|30th anniversary of [[International Klezmer Festival in Safed|Klezmer festival in Safed]]

Since the late 1980s, an annual klezmer festival is held every summer in Safed, in the north of Israel.

In music

While traditional performances may have been on the decline, many Jewish composers who had mainstream success, such as Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, were still influenced by the klezmeric idioms heard during their youth (as Gustav Mahler had been). George Gershwin was familiar with klezmer music, and the opening clarinet glissando of "Rhapsody in Blue" suggests this influence, although the composer did not compose klezmer directly. Some clarinet stylings of swing jazz bandleaders Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw can be interpreted as having been derived from klezmer, as can the "freilach swing" playing of other Jewish artists of the period such as trumpeter Ziggy Elman.

At the same time, non-Jewish composers turned to klezmer for a prolific source of fascinating thematic material. Dmitri Shostakovich in particular admired klezmer music for embracing both the ecstasy and the despair of human life, and quoted several melodies in his chamber masterpieces, the Piano Quintet in G minor, op. 57 (1940), the Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, op. 67 (1944), and the String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, op. 110 (1960).

The compositions of Israeli-born composer Ofer Ben-Amots incorporate aspects of klezmer music, most notably his 2006 composition Klezmer Concerto. The piece is for klezmer clarinet (written for Jewish clarinetist David Krakauer), string orchestra, harp and percussion.

In visual art

thumb|Issachar Ber Ryback - Wedding Ceremony

The figure of the klezmer, as a romantic symbol of nineteenth century Jewish life, appeared in the art of a number of twentieth century Jewish artists such as Anatoly Kaplan, Issachar Ber Ryback, Marc Chagall, and Chaim Goldberg. Kaplan, making his art in the Soviet Union, was quite taken by the romantic images of the Klezmer in literature, and in particular in Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu, and depicted them in rich detail.

In film

  • Yidl Mitn Fidl (1936), directed by Joseph Green
  • Fiddler on the Roof (1971), directed by Norman Jewison
  • Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973), directed by Gérard Oury
  • Jewish Soul Music: The Art of Giora Feidman (1980), directed by Uri Barbash
  • A Jumpin' Night in the Garden of Eden (1988), directed by Michal Goldman
  • Fiddlers on the Hoof (1989), directed by Simon Broughton
  • The Last Klezmer: Leopold Kozlowski: His Life and Music (1994), directed by Yale Strom
  • Beyond Silence (1996), about a klezmer-playing clarinetist, directed by Charlotte Link
  • A Tickle in the Heart (1996), directed by Stefan Schwietert
  • Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler's House (1996), aired 29 June 1996 on Great Performances (PBS/WNET television series)
  • L'homme est une femme comme les autres (1998, directed by Jean-Jacques Zilbermann with soundtrack by Giora Feidman)
  • Dummy (2002), directed by Greg Pritikin
  • Klezmer on Fish Street (2003), directed by Yale Strom
  • Le Tango des Rashevski (2003) directed by Sam Garbarski
  • Klezmer in Germany (2007), directed by Kryzstof Zanussi and C. Goldie
  • A Great Day on Eldridge Street (2008), directed by Yale Strom
  • The "Socalled" Movie (2010), directed by Garry Beitel
  • The Klezmer Project, 2023 Argentine documentary

In literature

In Jewish literature, the klezmer was often represented as a romantic and somewhat unsavory figure. However, in nineteenth century works by writers such as Mendele Mocher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem they were also portrayed as great artists and virtuosos who delighted the masses. The novel was later adapted into a Yiddish musical by Avram Goldfaden titled (1908).

See also

  • List of klezmer bands
  • List of klezmer musicians
  • Secular Jewish music

References

  • YIVO Encyclopedia article on Traditional and Instrumental Music of Eastern European Jews
  • KlezKanada, Yiddish Summer Weimar, Yiddish New York, festivals where klezmer music is taught
  • Klezmer Institute, an academic group aiming to study and discuss klezmer
  • Yiddish American Popular Sheet Music, a collection of public domain and unpublished scores in the Library of Congress, including the handwritten scores of a number of early American klezmer artists
  • Mayrent Collection of Yiddish recordings, an open archive of digitized Yiddish and klezmer recordings
  • KlezmerGuide.com. Comprehensive cross-reference to klezmer recordings and sheet music sources
  • Klezmer Podcast and Radiant Others , two podcasts (currently inactive) which interviewed klezmer performers and scholars