Scanning a subculture: introduction to klezmerology

Judaism, Wntr, 1998 by Mark Slobin

Klezkamp is the very visible tip of a klezmer iceberg. Over the last twenty years, the Jewish, and then the non-Jewish, world has noticed the rapid emergence of klezmer life. From a tentative start aimed at recreating musical texts that had fallen out of favor, young musicians created a "scene" that quickly matured into a sensibility about Jewish music and Jewish history. In the 1990s, the action expanded explosively into new conceptual and geographical territories, creating what I am brashly calling a subculture for want of a better word. In the amorphous, protean world of Jews and Jewophiles, klezmer occupies not just a niche, but a huge, shapeless sector inhabited by everyone from campus bands to Itzhak Perlman, from Berlin neophytes to street-smart Manhattanites. "Klezmer" is at your wedding, on public television, and on festival stages from Cracow to California, with bands cropping up across the Euro-American world broadly considered, including Australia and the Volga city of Samara. Yet there has been no time in this almost feverish expansion to stop for breath, to take stock of where klezmer has been and where it's heading.

In October of 1996, Wesleyan University sponsored the first-ever Klezmer Research Conference, a high-level gathering of performer/researchers and professors, I co-hosted with Hankus Netsky, a foundational figure in the klezmer movement and currently a Ph.D. student at Wesleyan. It was the first time major players-literally and conceptually-in klezmer culture got together for the sole purpose of talking about research and thinking collectively about future directions. For some, the chance to take a break from the rigors of the road and chat with their colleagues was much appreciated. The Editor of Judaism kindly offered to present selected conference papers in the following pages, a sampling of what happened at Wesleyan, preceded by an historical overview by Hankus Netsky.

The papers, given here close to their orally-presented versions, make clear just how wide we can open the umbrella term "klezmer." Robert Rothstein and Jim Loeffler take us on the search for a historic klezmer world. By concentrating on professional musicians' argot and even their New York labor union, these writers make it possible for us to imagine an actual klezmer culture of both Europe and America that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Joel Rubin's recent research on the context of klezmer tunes in Israel underscores the complexity of a Jewish music culture that is both geographically and conceptually diffuse, with an age-old emphasis on local adaptation. Having come this far, the reader should be ready to appreciate the analysis of today's American klezmer culture by two prime proponents and participants, Frank London and Alicia Svigals, known for their work in a prominent band, The Klezmatics.

Missing from the conference, and hence from our survey here, is a representative or account of the swelling ranks of non-Jewish European klezmer musicians. By all accounts, Berlin is the city where one might have the most concentrated klezmer experience on a given weekend. Australia, Italy, and Sweden would have to be included. And it would be nice to hear the voices of eastern European Jewish musicians who, for a variety of reasons, have been coming to klezmer culture as part of a search for identity and hard currency in post-communist times. Perhaps the next stage in klezmerology will be a true World Conference that can measure just how far research, music, and the klezmer subculture will have traveled over the next few years. If the action is anywhere as far- and fast-moving as it has been over the last decade, the story told here will have added some surprising new chapters.

For no one at the first Klezkamp in 1985, as I was, would have believed the directions this trend has taken. The idea that Itzhak Perlman would sell 200,000 copies of his first klezmer album would have been labeled pure fantasy. The notion that John Zorn, the arch-downtown New York composer, would form a record label named Tzadik, field his own band called Masada, and pack in audiences for a string of concerts in Taiwan with Ornette Coleman-based,Jewish-flavored music would have been a late-night fantasy after too much mediocre Catskills food. The concept of introducing klezmer as a hip style to young queer-identified Manhattanites would have been considered wildly unlikely. Yet here we are in 1998, and who's to say what's next?

Klezmerology is, then, a high-risk enterprise for many reasons, and it all starts with the challenge of defining the music and its world in the first place-Europe - and the second place, America. Jewish music itself is a puzzle. Since Jews everywhere have shaped their culture to local lifestyles even while they've stubbornly maintained the world of their sacred texts, there's no "real" music for this diasporic folk; Moroccan Jewish music sounds Moroccan, German Jewish music German, and so on, through today's United States, where the most widespread contemporary component has been the American popular sound. So the "authentic" context of "klezmer music" (a term only invented around 1980) is one of interaction, mixture, accommodation, adaptation-words like that come to mind first, since what did a klezmer do? Play what people wanted to hear. And they might want to hear almost anything in the air at the moment. In 1900 eastern Europe, this might have been popular dances of the day like the waltz, or a light classical piece if the person hiring the klezmer was the local Polish landlord.