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Klezmer
Klezmer ( yi, קלעזמער or ) is an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for listening; these would have been played at weddings and other social functions. The musical genre incorporated elements of many other musical genres including Ottoman (especially Greek and Romanian) music, Baroque music, German and Slavic folk dances, and religious Jewish music. As the music arrived in the United States, it lost some of its traditional ritual elements and adopted elements of American big band and popular music. Among the European-born klezmers who popularized the genre in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s were Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein; they were followed by American-born musicians such as Max Epstein, Sid Beckerman and Ray Musiker. After the destruction of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the Holoca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Klezmorim
The Klezmorim, founded in Berkeley, California, in 1975, was the world's first klezmer revival band, widely credited with spearheading the global renaissance of klezmer (Eastern European Yiddish instrumental music) in the 1970s and 1980s.Thompson, Suzy R., "The Klezmorim," in McGovern, Adam (ed.), ''musicHound World'', Visible Ink, 2000, , p. 398.Strom, Yale, ''The Book of Klezmer'', A Capella, Chicago, 2002, , pp. 208–209. Initially featuring flute and strings—notably the exotic fiddling of co-founder David Skuse—the ensemble reorganized into a "loose, roaring, funky" brass/reed/percussion band fronted by co-founder Lev Liberman's saxophones and founding member David Julian Gray's clarinets. As a professional performing and recording ensemble focused on recreating the lost sounds of early 20th century klezmer bands, The Klezmorim achieved crossover success, garnering a Grammy nomination in 1982 for their album ''Metropolis'' and selling out major concert venues across North ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Naftule Brandwein
Naftule Brandwein, or Naftuli Brandwine, ( yi, נפתלי בראַנדװײַן, 1884–1963) was an Austrian-born Jewish American Klezmer musician, clarinetist, bandleader and recording artist active from the 1910s to the 1940s. Along with Dave Tarras, he is considered to be among the top klezmer musicians of the twentieth century, and has a continuing influence on musicians in the genre a century later. Along with Tarras and other contemporaries like Israel J. Hochman, Max Leibowitz and Harry Kandel, he also helped forge the new American klezmer sound of the early twentieth century, which gradually gravitated towards a sophisticated big-band sound. Biography Early life Brandwein was born on September 20, 1884 in Przemyslany, Austro-Hungarian Galicia (now Ukraine). He was born into a dynasty of klezmer musicians, part of the Stretiner Hasidic dynasty founded by Rabbi Yehuda Hirsch Brandwein of Stratin. His father Peysekhe (Paul) played violin, clarinet, and was an imp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dave Tarras
Dave Tarras (c. 1895 – February 13, 1989) was a Ukrainian-born American klezmer clarinetist and bandleader, a celebrated klezmer musician, instrumental in Klezmer revival. Biography Early life Tarras was born David Tarasiuk in Teplyk, Ukraine and later moved to Ternivka, a village which was then in Podolian Governorate, Russian Empire and which is now in Teplytskyi Raion, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine. Shulamit Shalit"Король клейзмеров Дэйв Таррас (1897-1989)" ''Evreyskaya Starina'', no. 4(79), 2013; ''Quote'': "Родом мы из Теплика, это на Украине. Потом уже в Терновку перебрались" We hail from Teplyk, and only later moved to Ternivka"/ref> His exact birthday is disputed; it is often given as March 15, 1895, but other credible accounts give it as 1898. He came from a klezmer family; to the family of Rakhmil Tarasyuk, who was a klezmer trombonist, and Sheyndl, his grandfather was a fiddler and '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moisei Beregovsky
Moisei Iakovlevich Beregovsky (russian: Моисей Яковлевич Береговский, yi, משה אהרן בערעגאָווסקי; 1892–1961) was a Soviet Jewish folklorist and ethnomusicologist from Ukraine, who published mainly in Russian and Yiddish. He has been called the "foremost ethnomusicologist of Eastern European Jewry".p.253 "A Fresh Look at Beregovski's Folk Music Research" by Mark Slobin. Ethnomusicology, Vol. 30, No. 2 His research and life's work included the collection, transcription and analysis of the melodies, texts and culture of Yiddish folk song, wordless melodies (nigunim), East European Jewish instrumental music for both dancing and listening (klezmer music), Purim plays (Yiddish: פורים-שפיל / purim-shpil), and exploration of the relationship between East European Jewish and Ukrainian traditional music. Biography Early life Beregovsky was born into the family of a Jewish parochial primary school ( kheyder) teacher in the village of Te ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andy Statman
Andy Statman (born 1950) is a noted American klezmer clarinetist and bluegrass/ newgrass mandolinist. Life and career Statman was born in New York City and grew up in the borough of Queens. Beginning at age 12, he learned to play banjo and guitar, following the example of his older brother Jimmy, and then switched to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong-friend David Grisman. He learned to play R&B and jazz saxophone, for a time under the tutelage of Richard Grando, who played saxophone in Earth Opera. As a teenager Statman was already performing in public in Washington Square Park and with local string bands. In 1969 he attended Franconia College in Franconia, New Hampshire, but eventually dropped out to pursue a musical career. He first gained acclaim as a mandolinist as a sideman with David Bromberg and Russ Barenberg, as well as in the pioneering bluegrass bands Country Cookin' and Breakfast Special. During the course of exploring a wide range of roots an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sidney Beckerman (musician)
Sidney Beckerman (1919–2007) was an influential klezmer clarinet player. He learned the style from his father Shloimke, who was himself a well known klezmer soloist. Sidney played Jewish weddings and celebrations in New York City and the Catskills throughout the 1930s. After World War II ended, he returned to New York and started working for the US Postal Service. Upon his retirement in 1982, he was convinced by fellow klezmer musician Pete Sokolow to join the band Klezmer Plus!. A recording of this band in 1989 (with Howie Leess) was named an Outstanding Folk Recording by the Library of Congress Sidney was also a founding member of the klezmer music camp Klezkamp KlezKamp was a yearly Klezmer music and Yiddish culture festival in New York State. Produced by ethnomusicologist and award-winning record and radio producer Henry Sapoznik from 1985 - 2015, the program created an innovative and intensive environ .... He was inducted into the ''People's Hall of Fame'' in Fe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Accordion
Accordions (from 19th-century German ''Akkordeon'', from ''Akkord''—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a reed in a frame), colloquially referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist. The concertina , harmoneon and bandoneón are related. The harmonium and American reed organ are in the same family, but are typically larger than an accordion and sit on a surface or the floor. The accordion is played by compressing or expanding the bellows while pressing buttons or keys, causing ''pallets'' to open, which allow air to flow across strips of brass or steel, called '' reeds''. These vibrate to produce sound inside the body. Valves on opposing reeds of each note are used to make the instrument's reeds sound louder without air leaking from each reed block.For the accordion's place among the families of mu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yiddish Language
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages.Aram Yardumian"A Tale of Two Hypotheses: Genetics and the Ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jewry".University of Pennsylvania. 2013. Yiddish is primarily written in the Hebrew alphabet. Prior to World War II, its worldwide peak was 11 million, with the number of speakers in the United States and Canada then totaling 150,000. Eighty-five percent of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,Solomon Birnbaum, ''Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache'' (4., erg. Aufl., Ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ornamentation (music)
In music, ornaments or embellishments are musical flourishes—typically, added notes—that are not essential to carry the overall line of the melody (or harmony), but serve instead to decorate or "ornament" that line (or harmony), provide added interest and variety, and give the performer the opportunity to add expressiveness to a song or piece. Many ornaments are performed as "fast notes" around a central, main note. There are many types of ornaments, ranging from the addition of a single, short grace note before a main note to the performance of a virtuosic and flamboyant trill. The amount of ornamentation in a piece of music can vary from quite extensive (it was often extensive in the Baroque period, from 1600 to 1750) to relatively little or even none. The word ''agrément'' is used specifically to indicate the French Baroque style of ornamentation. Improvised vs. written In the Baroque period, it was common for performers to improvise ornamentation on a given melodic li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metonymy
Metonymy () is a figure of speech in which a concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept. Etymology The words ''metonymy'' and ''metonym'' come from grc, μετωνυμία, 'a change of name', from , 'after, post, beyond' and , , a suffix that names figures of speech, from , or , 'name'. Background Metonymy and related figures of speech are common in everyday speech and writing. Synecdoche and metalepsis are considered specific types of metonymy. Polysemy, the capacity for a word or phrase to have multiple meanings, sometimes results from relations of metonymy. Both metonymy and metaphor involve the substitution of one term for another. In metaphor, this substitution is based on some specific analogy between two things, whereas in metonymy the substitution is based on some understood association or contiguity. American literary theorist Kenneth Burke considers metonymy as one of four "master tropes": metaphor, meto ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous member state of the European Union. Warsaw is the nation's capital and largest metropolis. Other major cities include Kraków, Wrocław, Łódź, Poznań, Gdańsk, and Szczecin. Poland has a temperate transitional climate and its territory traverses the Central European Plain, extending from Baltic Sea in the north to Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains in the south. The longest Polish river is the Vistula, and Poland's highest point is Mount Rysy, situated in the Tatra mountain range of the Carpathians. The country is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west. It also shares maritime boundaries with Denmark a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bohemia
Bohemia ( ; cs, Čechy ; ; hsb, Čěska; szl, Czechy) is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech Republic. Bohemia can also refer to a wider area consisting of the historical Lands of the Bohemian Crown ruled by the Bohemian kings, including Moravia and Czech Silesia, in which case the smaller region is referred to as Bohemia proper as a means of distinction. Bohemia was a duchy of Great Moravia, later an independent principality, a kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire, and subsequently a part of the Habsburg monarchy and the Austrian Empire. After World War I and the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state, the whole of Bohemia became a part of Czechoslovakia, defying claims of the German-speaking inhabitants that regions with German-speaking majority should be included in the Republic of German-Austria. Between 1938 and 1945, these border regions were joined to Nazi Germany as the Sudetenland. The remainder of Czech territory became the Seco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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