Camac recently lent Israeli harpist Hila Ofek an instrument for her recent concert and recording with Giora Feidman in Munich. Giora Feidman, Hila‘s grandfather, is one of the most famous klezmer clarinettists in the world and I am a big fan of klezmer music anyway, so I enthusiastically went to the library to take out all his CDs and do some research. The first thing I read was by a musicologist, Susan Bauer: "the first time I heard klezmer…I thought: this music sounds somehow close to me – somehow Bavarian, really." I was just about to laugh when I realized it was true. Not that klezmer has significant musicological links with Bavarian folk music, but that, regardless of their own culture, few people fail to be moved by klezmer.
Indeed, klezmer has homes all over the world. Its origins lie with the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe in the sixteenth century. Their musicians were at first called Lezim, Lejzim or Lezanim, expressions which are found in the Talmud in connection with world music. They were later known as Badchanim and finally, Klezmorim. The Klezmorim were wandering musicians, who carried news and gossip as well as music from shtetl (the small, predominantly Jewish towns in pre-Holocaust Europe) to shtetl.
The Klezmorim performed largely dance music for Jewish weddings and other festivals, and also played a ceremonial role. Their music was rooted both in religious aspects of Jewish culture, influenced by the local music wherever they happened to be, and also had a big Gypsy element. The Klezmorim continued to gather strength until their hey-day in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By this time, a wide and varied repertoire had been developed, and the word "klezmer" began to be used to describe their music as a genre, rather than simply the musicians ("a klezmer" is the singular form of "klezmorim").
Whether you use the term to describe the musician or the music, the Holocaust and Stalinism destroyed most klezmer; it survived best in Moldavia, the southern Ukraine, whence Giora Feidman‘s parents came. By the time Feidman was born in 1936 they had immigrated - in this case to Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were not alone: thousands of European Jews set sail, particularly to America. The Klezmer Revival of the 1970s is largely a third-generation American-Jewish phenomenon. In stylistic terms, with its American jazz and blues, the involvement of interested non-Jewish classical musicians and an increased focus on concerts instead of occasional music, it has ended up far from its Eastern European roots, but is no less klezmer for that. While the pianist and arranger Peter Sokolow warned "Klezmer has expanded to become a generic term for all this kind of stuff that‘s based on whatever‘s Jewish" , it is in klezmer‘s nature – like that of its migrant performers – to integrate with its surroundings. Alicia Svigals, violinist with major Klezmer-Revival band The Klezmatics, described this in an interview:
"Older groups took the old recordings and transcribed them, trying to achieve the sound that they heard. We really owed a lot to them, but we are ready to do something else with the old material. We said "This was our grandparents‘ music, but now it‘s ours.
We‘re Jewish-Americans and this is our native musical language. We decided to integrate the music into something that made sense to us, as if it were Led Zeppelin, Philip Glass, or other music that we also identified with."
Jewish people have suffered persecution since Biblical times, forcing them to be perpetually on the move. By the time the State of Israel was finally re-established in 1948, Jews had been without a national home for over two thousand years. It is unsurprising that klezmer music is so flexible, wide-ranging and hard academically to pin down. As Hankus Netsky, founder of the Klezmer Conservatory Band said, "How can anyone put walls around an ethnic identity that has no home?"
A new wave of immigrants – Giora Feidman among them – moved "home" to this new Israel, from the lands their parents had themselves emigrated to. They brought the music of these countries with them. The classically-trained Feidman became the youngest member of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the which classical career has been accompanied by many recordings of Piazzolla and other tangos from his birthplace Argentina. Indeed, while he had always heard klezmer from his musician parents, it was "not until I actually set foot in Israel did I realize how important Jewish music would eventually become for me".
Feidman‘s subsequent vast, eclectic career is remarkable in its freedom from boundaries between cultures or musical styles. For him, "home" is somewhere internal. Israel provides a sense of place which helps define and access this private quiet - "our generation has the privilege to return home – to Judaism, to solitude, to a place where one can find oneself" – but it is the spiritual, universal power of music and its window on the inner self that is of fundamental importance to him.
Perhaps klezmer connects with a kind of universal musical response particularly strongly, which is why so many people, Jewish or not, feel so powerfully drawn to it. Referring as far back as the original wandering Klezmorim, Feidman argues that "The emotional awareness of life that these homeless Eastern European musicians experienced alternated between one of melancholy, despair, and unbridled joy in the untroubled moments they had. This music can be arousing, funny and full of the joys of life, but it can also bring one to tears." .
The word "klezmer" comes from kley (instrument) and zemer (song) in Yiddish, and the Hebrew relative "k‘li zemer" means "vessels of song" A Klezmer musician aims to sing with his instrument; he plays mostly dance music, and again Feidman notes that singing and dancing are among our most fundamental, natural spiritual experiences.
"Singing and dancing—those are the natural forces. They are necessities, like eating, drinking water and sleeping. One must sing.
Newborn babies tell their mothers: "If you want to communicate with me, I only know one language. You must sing to me!" There is not a mother on the whole planet who does not sing to her child. Could an electric guitar substitute for that?
And once the baby takes your left and right hand, he is asking you to dance. The mother thinks the baby will someday be an athlete—he dances!
Dancing and singing are so necessary, but in Western society these natural forces have no resonance. Traveling to Tibet, China, or India, one realizes how many people are aware of this. In the West, though, people concentrate on the practical aspects of everyday life and care so much about being comfortable."
Obviously, the harp does not appear in any list of original klezmer instruments. Nor does the classical string quartet, but this is the instrumentation Feidman has chosen for his latest concerts with Hila Ofek and the Gershwin Quartet. In Munich, they have been recording a new work by Ora Bat Chaim, which brings classical and folk traditions together. Hila Ofek told me about this marriage of different worlds: "It is very special for me to play with my grandfather, who is my great inspiration, and while there are so many different kinds of klezmer music, I feel very connected to it, to the traditional and sometimes very ancient songs I have heard since I was a child. Equally, the concert harp is not a folk instrument and you have to be sensitive to traditional klezmer styles, and above all to feel natural and free, to learn the music by heart rather than with your head. In classical music, you have to be technically very accomplished and it‘s easy to get bogged down in this, forgetting to be free, to feel joy in playing.
My grandfather and I are always finding new things to play together: we also play classical music, such as the concerto 'If it's true' by Peter Breiner, which we performed with the Jerusalem Symphony last October. Soon I will compete in the Ben-Haim competition, which a classical competition, for Israeli music only. It‘s the first time I have played so many Israeli pieces together, because I had so much standard harp repertoire to learn first, and it has been amazing to discover music with so many Jewish or Israeli elements, that is also well-written for the harp and enjoys a place in the classical canon.
Once I finish my studies in Israel, I hope to go to Europe for a while. It‘s important for a musician to know many things."
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