Musical Fusion and Allusion in the Core and the Transitional Klezmer Repertoires

Abstract:Uniquely within Europe—from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries—in Ottoman and then post-Ottoman Moldova, Jewish klezmer and Gypsy (lautar) musicians had worked within a single professional structure. As the Ottoman Empire gradually withdrew from the Danubian Principalities (Wallachia and Moldova) during the mid-nineteenth century, a new "national" dance music was created by Gypsy, Jewish, Austrian, Greek, and other musicians in the Moldavian cities. Local klezmorim created a Judaized version of this repertoire. By the last third of the century this new repertoire also took hold among Jewish communities in Ukraine and Galicia. Part of the popularity of this repertoire lay in its partial continuity with an earlier Greco-Turkish element within klezmer music. This entire group of dance genres were barely acknowledged and never analyzed by the initial Russian and Soviet researchers, such as Engel, Kiselgoff, Beregovski, and Magid. Hence in 1994 I had coined the term "transitional" klezmer repertoire to describe it. The "transitional" and some of the "core" klezmer repertoires were transported massively with the contemporaneous Jewish immigration to America. The newer transitional repertoire dominated the klezmer music known by mid-century and thereafter. While the leading immigrant klezmorim—such as Dave Tarras (1897–1989)—were well aware of these distinctions of repertoire, they were quickly forgotten by the native-born generations of musicians. At the same time, the retention of earlier Greco-Turkish elements allowed for new interactions with immigrant Greek musicians. Thus, any attempt to analyze the entire klezmer repertoire must first deal with the relationship between the "core" and the "transitional" repertoires.