klezmer music

klezmer music, genre of music derived from and built upon eastern European music in the Jewish tradition. The common usage of the term developed about 1980; historically, a klezmer (plural: klezmorim or klezmers) was a male professional instrumental musician, usually Jewish, who played in a band hired for special occasions in eastern European communities. In the 21st century, klezmer music can be heard wherever Jews have settled.

The Yiddish word klezmer derives from two Hebrew roots: klei (“vessel” or “instrument”) and zemer (“song”). From the 18th century on in eastern Europe, klezmer largely superseded other Yiddish terms for instrumentalists, such as shpilman (“player” or “musician”), muzikant (“musician,” eventually used for the classically trained), or leyts (“jester,” an entertainer). The position of the Jewish musician was somewhat tenuous. Christian towns regulated all musicians’ activities, specifying acceptable times and places of performance as well as how Jews and non-Jews could interact. For this and other reasons—such as the effect on families of the unsettled life of musicians, who might travel extensively or behave unconventionally—professional instrumental musicians were not highly regarded in Jewish society. Nevertheless, they found a niche in rapidly growing towns and cities, playing for celebrations (most commonly weddings) as well as for communal events, such as holidays, and in private homes for Jewish or non-Jewish patrons.

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Information about the klezmorim became much more reliable in the later 19th century as biographies, legends, and fictional accounts multiplied. Although they remained the object of suspicion, klezmorim gained in stature through virtuosity and the ability to move an audience—both to dance and to tears—at weddings. The best-known account of music in 19th-century Jewish European life was the novel Stempenyu (1889) by the acclaimed Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, based in part on the life of Yosef Druker, one of the era’s great klezmorim.

The klezmer calling was hereditary and male; generally, a boy studied with his father, although some boys apprenticed themselves to musicians in other towns. Musicians had their own professional argot, klezmer-loshn. The best account of training and the most comprehensive collection of tunes were produced by Moshe Beregovski, the foremost ethnomusicologist of eastern European Jewry; his findings were grounded in extensive recording and fieldwork in southern Ukraine and adjacent Belarus in the first half of the 20th century.

From the mid-19th century on, music of the klezmorim spread from the borderlands of the Ottoman Empire (e.g., the former Moldavia, Bessarabia, and Transylvania, all within or neighbouring present-day Romania) to areas north and west. Like folk songs, instrumental music moved along purely Jewish networks of transmission, disregarding the shifting national boundaries of the period. So, for example, the doina, a sometimes rhapsodic instrumental piece adapted from a Romanian shepherd-song genre, moved far from its roots in southeastern Europe up to Lithuania.

The klezmer band was known by various names (for example, kapelye or khevrisa, both meaning professional instrumental ensemble). Instrumentation differed according to period, place, availability of the instruments, and taste. A typical band included at least two violinists, backed by a bass or cello, along with other instruments. The most accomplished violinist was usually the leader of the band. The tsimbl (cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer) and the flute were quite common at first; the clarinet and various brass instruments joined in the era of sound recording.

At weddings, the klezmorim played two kinds of pieces to accompany the ritualized series of events: those, like the plaintive doina or songlike zogekhts, for listening and reflection (and the occasion for weeping at weddings) and others for dancing. The most common dance genres were the freylekhs (a dance tune in sections), sher (a type of music, often part of a suite, used for complex contredanse-type figures), and khosidl (essentially a slower freylekhs, associated with Hasidic dancing). There were many other types, some adapted from the regional musical styles of the day, but information is scarce because “Yiddish” dance, unlike the music, has rarely been studied. The klezmer was sometimes hired by, and usually associated with, the badkhn, a wedding bard who improvised rhymes for the occasion and acted as a master of ceremonies. Weddings, which were usually protracted events—various phases occurred over several days—included the gas-nign (“street tune”), which was played to accompany wedding guests through the streets from one house to another.

Close ties bind the musical roots and aesthetic of the klezmer repertoire with other domains of Jewish music. These include the tunes of the Hasidim—whose catchy and soulful melodies were also used for both religious contemplation (or transcendence) and spirited dancing—as well as the sacred songs of the khazn, or cantor, an increasingly popular and virtuosic singer and social figure in the late 19th century. As soon as Jews were allowed into the professional music schools of the Russian Empire, scions of klezmer families such as the early 20th-century violinist Mischa Elman moved into, and eventually dominated, the world of the classical music virtuoso.

Beginning about 1880, the mass emigration of eastern European Jews, particularly to North America, saw klezmorim moving along with their communities to the large cities of the United States and Canada. The ethnomusicologist Hankus Netsky’s research in Philadelphia documents the survival of specific regional repertoires in America, as klezmer families continued to thrive and hand down their tunes. Many of the musicians also found work in mainstream musical organizations, such as the Philadelphia Orchestra or the brass bands of John Philip Sousa and the ragtime composer and trombonist Arthur Pryor, and those experiences in turn influenced the klezmer repertoire.

The new recording industry at the turn of the 20th century captured klezmer at this moment of bicultural creativity. Bands beefed up their staffing to project their sound and compensate for the limited acoustic possibilities of early sound recording. The clarinet, often backed by strong brass bass lines, superseded the quieter instruments, especially the flute, tsimbl, and violin. The heyday of commercial recording of klezmorim extended from 1914 to 1932, and clarinetists such as Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras emerged as the leading figures. The great majority of the klezmer recordings that survive from this era were pressed in the New York City area.

The lively syncopated-rhythm bulgar, which had limited popularity in Europe, became a major dance genre among klezmer bands in the United States. By the 1930s and ’40s, many klezmorim moved beyond specifically Jewish work to join mainstream dance bands. With this transition they created the hybrid “Yiddish swing” repertoire, some of which turned into crossover hits, such as Benny Goodman’s 1939 “And the Angels Sing” (with lyrics by Johnny Mercer), adapted by Goodman trumpeter Ziggy Elman from a Dave Tarras bulgar. The Holocaust cut off American klezmer from its roots and dried up the source of new immigrant musicians, causing klezmer to fade from the scene.

Yet in the mid-1970s, younger American musicians from varying musical backgrounds rediscovered this “roots” music on 78-rpm recordings, and they sought out the surviving old masters—of whom Dave Tarras was particularly influential. The klezmer revitalization (to use the American ethnomusicologist and performer Michael Alpert’s term) spread surprisingly quickly across North America and even to Europe by the late 1980s. Bands of Germans and Italians sprang up, tutored by touring American musicians. Even Israel, where people had been commonly hostile to “Yiddish” culture, became a site of klezmer activity. Female musicians increasingly participated, and some of them became prominent klezmer soloists for the first time.

Klezmer came to refer to the whole ramified scene of local, touring, and recording bands, which has been partly integrated into the broader category of world music. In the 21st century fledgling klezmorim studied with masters at centralized workshops and institutes held regularly in the United States and Europe, and the academic study of klezmorim and their music was well established.