Klezmer

The wedding-band music of Eastern European Jews, its clarinet carrying both lament and celebration.

Related

TraditionalModeClarinetViolin

Klezmer is the wedding-band music of Eastern European Jews, its clarinet holding lament and celebration.

Origins and era

In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, Ashkenazi communities hired bands for weddings. A band usually had violin, clarinet, cello or bass, cimbalom and drum, drawing on religious chant and Balkan dance tunes. Migrants brought it to New York in the 1880s, and the record industry of the 1910s and 1920s made Brandwein and Tarras stars. The Second World War destroyed the Eastern European centre, and a revival from the 1970s brought it back to the stage.

What you hear

Melodies often use a Phrygian-like scale with a lowered second degree, producing a striking augmented second. The clarinet adds slides, trills and ornaments in the high register, imitating a human wail. Rhythms include the slow doina, the hora, and wedding processional tunes. A band may move from mourning to celebration within one piece.

Key figures

Brandwein's recordings fixed improvised ornament as a style, and Tarras made the clarinet the lead voice. Feidman carried klezmer into the concert hall, while the Klezmatics and the Klezmer Conservatory Band drove the revival.

Lineage

Eastern European Jewish chant, Yiddish song and Balkan dance feed in; the American revival, jazz klezmer and world-music fusion come out.

Common misunderstandings

Klezmer is not all mournful, since wedding tunes matter just as much. It does not rely on the clarinet alone, as the violin was more central in early bands. It is not ritual music, since most occasions were secular weddings.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Klezmer（Oxford University Press），用于核对东欧源流与美国复兴
• Walter Zev Feldman, Klezmer, Music, History, and Memory（Oxford University Press, 2016），用于核对乐队编制与曲目类型

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.