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Posts Tagged ‘clarinet klezmer’

Trying to give a extensive definition of the klezmer is quite a difficult task. Originally, this is the music of the Jewish communities who lived in Eastern Europe a few centuries ago.

It is a buoyant dance music meant to go along with the events of the Jewish social life like weddings and days of celebration. Klezmer is a music capable of expressing and embracing the human passions and feelings, from blessedness to unhappiness, from laugh to teardrops.

In truth the word klezmer is the juxtaposition of two Hebrew words, “kli” and “zemer” which mean respectively instrument and song, klezmer is therefore word for word the instrument of the song, the vessel of the voice.

Klezmer was played by traveling musicians strolling from Shtetl to Shtetl (the Shtetl is a yiddish word which means village), trying to earn a living performing their craft. There were many music genres which influenced klezmer, such as the Hazanut (synagogue chanting), reproducing the bending of the human voice, the hasidic nigunim (wordless tunes), popular dances, folk songs, or solemn hymns before prayers.

Now and then the klezmorim (plural of klezmer which means Klezmer musicians) were invited by non-Jewish local nobles who asked them to play contemporary popular tunes. Therefore the klezmer musicians played the local repertoire such as Hungarian, Bulgarian, Bessarabian, Romanian, Moldavian, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Polish…

The klezmer music was thus inspired by the non-Jewish traditions and cultures, but on the other hand the local musicians of each region and country were in their turn influenced by the klezmer.

There is a certain confusion about the general term of klezmer, first it was intended to designate the musical instruments themselves. At some point occured a semantic merging between the musician and his instrument, and klezmer began to mean the artist playing the instrument. It is only in the thirties of last century that Beregowsky, the musicologist, used the word klezmer to refer to the music.

The klezmer was brought to Western Europe and to North-America by the immigrants who fled the persecutions and the pogroms at the end of the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century there was a flourishing of the Yiddish culture and klezmer music thanks to such clarinet musicians as Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein. They were both virtuoso clarinet players, each in his own style and they were prominent contributors of the blossoming of Jewish life and klezmer music in America.

From the thirties till the seventies, the klezmer was out of the limelights. The reasons why klezmer sink into oblivion were multiple. Among them were the holocaust, six millions Jewish were murdered, the emergence of new styles of music, jazz, rock-and-roll, much more attractive for the young people in search of new ways of expression, and paradoxically when the new State of Israel was created in 1948, the klezmer was put aside because the people wanted to revoke anything evocative of the holocaust and the bad days.

It is only in the seventies that some precursor musicians like Andy Statman, Henry Sapoznik, Zev Feldman, Hankus Netsky and the “klezmorim” in the U.S.A. and Giora Feidman in the European continent, started what is called the “klezmer rebirth”.

Since then, the popularity of klezmer music is continually prospering and it is loved and appreciated by Jewish and non-Jewish people in all part of our global world.

Author Bio: Arik Nitsan is an Israeli klezmer clarinetist and an expert author who writes regularly about klezmer music and klezmer events. You can find a lot of information by visiting his website clarinet and klezmer located at http://www.clarinet-klezmer.com

The Klezmer music is the traditional Jewish music originated in Eastern Europe in the last centuries. In fact, the term Klezmer is a yiddish word which is a contraction of two Hebrew words, “kli” and “zemer”. The meaning of kli is instrument, tool, while zemer definition is air, melody, song.

So the Klezmer is the instrument of the song, the vessel of the voice. At the origin, the word klezmer was employed to designate the itinerant Jewish musicians (the plural is “klezmorim”) who were playing at weddings and celebrations, traveling from village to village. The Jewish folk music had many cultural and geographical influences. Although being essentially an Ashkenazi music the impact of the Oriental, Greek, Turkish, Jewish and non Jewish communities living in the Ottoman empire was not negligible.

Wherever they were, The musicians picked up music from the people living around them, the Gypsies, Romanian, Ukrainian, Moldavian, Lithuanian, Polish and many others. But in spite of or maybe thanks to all those external influences the Klezmer kept his particularity, his characteristics and his unmistakable sound. At the beginning of the 20th century, this music style was indexed as Jewish music, Yiddish folk music or even as “Bulgar”, but gradually the word Klezmer began to refer to the style and the repertoire.

It is probably Moshe Beregowsky, a Russian-Jewish ethnomusicologist who used for the first time the term Klezmer as the music performed by the Klezmorim. In the seventies, while the Klezmer revival occurred, the word was definitively adopted as the generic term for the musicians and the music style.

Hence, while the music itself is a few centuries old, the word Klezmer is a kind of neologism. In fact the juxtaposition of klezmer and music is a tautology, a redundancy. Although the Klezmer is a secular music, its roots are religious, liturgic. The fact is that globally and in every culture, music has always a religious or mystical origin. It is a way to accompany the rites or the ceremonies, to reach a state of trance and to approach the divinity.

Klezmer is not an exception, the Psalms of King David in the Bible are maybe the first apparition of structured music. The Klezmer adopted also the intonation and the voicing of the cantor at the synagogue. The Klezmer is not playing, but rather he is singing through his instrument, hence first the violin and then the clarinet were the instruments of predilection for the Klezmer, because they are very close to the human voice.

The art of klezmer is an art of interpretation, many players can play the same tune, the same melody, the same nigun (nigun in Yiddish means a wordless melody), but it will always sound different, because each musician is expressing his deep emotions and revealing his own soul. Giora Feidman, the great clarinet Klezmer player called this “the inner voice”. Maybe the Klezmer is the most appropriate musical expression to show off sentiments, feelings, sensibility. It can be joyful, it can cry, it can burst out laughing or burst into tears.

But in spite of this ambivalence, there is always a message of hope.

Author Bio: Arik Nitsan is a clarinetist who is specialized in Klezmer and world music. For more resources on clarinet and Klezmer, visit his website : clarinet-klezmer