Sounds of sensibility

Judaism, Wntr, 1998 by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

The word Jewish does appear on The Klezmorim's first album, but strictly in an historical context. The "Jewishness" of their project is carried instead by the word Yiddish and the prominence of Yiddish terms, song titles, and lyrics. They are klezmers by affinity, rather than by descent or Jewish identification. Where bloodlines are absent - Hankus Netsky, Judy Bressler, Henry Sapoznik, and Giora Feidman identify with Jewish instrumentalists and Yiddish performers in their families-affinities are invoked. Like their historical models, The Klezmorim explain, they started out playing in small bands, they improvise, they arrange their numbers communally and by ear, and they take pride in never playing a solo the same way twice.

In the absence of living models, particular importance is accorded texts (and in the case of klezmer music, records). Defining the relationship of contemporary performance to past models as best they can be reconstructed is an ongoing concern. As London commented, "Whenever we think we are being very now, very new, we find out what we have done is actually very traditional."(50) The sense of newness in the old and oldness in the new is also conveyed in a band name like Brave Old World and characterizations like "Making old-world music new."(51) Kapelye's first album was entitled Future and Past and carried the following dedication: "This album is dedicated to our families who have taught us that our future is our Jewish past."(52)

Anachronism is a productive principle, a musical aesthetic, which operates by unsettling temporal direction. There is no smooth continuity from yesterday's klezmorim to today's klezmers. There is no dramatic rupture, no simple sequence of life, death, and rebirth, as the term revival would imply. Instead, old and new are in a perpetually equivocal relationship. The future precedes the past, the new precedes the old, the revival precedes its historical models. While klezmer revival suggests the primacy of recovery, initially a copying of what can still be heard on old records and from elderly musicians, "it is the copying that originates," as Clifford Geertz has so aptly stated, even in the case of meticulous musical reconstructions.(53)

Klezmer musicians have felt a need to root present practice in a meaningful past, which is not the same as searching for roots, though for many the two come together. Even the term "roots music" conveys a sense of rootedness, rather than an exclusive claim to a singular origin. However much klezmer music offered clarinetist David Krakauer a "musical home," it was its fusion with jazz that gave his compositions what one reviewer characterized as "a thoroughly contemporary sensibility," no doubt because that fusion did not produce melting-pot music or a soft universalism or easy affirmation of a singular ethnic identity.(54) A sense of rootedness does not require musical monogamy.

While orthodoxy and heritage do not by any means exhaust the possible outcomes of rupture, they do force us to rethink any easy opposition between conservative and radical, tradition and innovation, custom and ideology. As Thompson notes for his period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, "So far from having the steady permanence suggested by the word 'tradition', custom was a field of change and contest, an arena in which opposing interests made conflicting claims . . . it is an arena of conflictual elements, which requires some compelling pressure - as, for example, nationalism or prevalent religious orthodoxy or class consciousness - to take form as 'system'."(55) Not only religious orthodoxy but also the klezmer revival have taken form as system. Indeed, the klezmer revival is an example of what Neil Rosenberg, in his taxonomy of music revivals, calls a named-system revival - others include Balkan, old-time fiddling, blues, and bluegrass.(56) System in this context signals the shift from tradition to ideology.