At once racous, virtuosic, mournful, ecstatic, traditional and avant guard, we have come to associate the quintessentially Ashkenazi Jewish musical form known as Klezmer with its cultural descendents – Broadway Shtetl imaginings, Big Band swing for clarinet virtuosos, hipster grunge and wedding kitsch. When we hear its rollicking timbres we think of Yiddish culture in the 19th century, forming for many of us a musical snapshot of the last tangible link we have to any nameable ancestors.
Yet Klezmer has roots that go back farther and spread far wider than the Pale of Settlement. It is an art form whose lineaments bear the scars and evidence of history – of wanderings and welcomings, exiles and arrivals, and flourishing interchanges in times and places that have been erroneously immortalized as religiously, racially, and culturally monolithic. Richard Wagner contributed to a myth of medieval Teutonic purity. With music as evidence, we seek to prove otherwise.
The medieval Jewish experience is one and the same with the origins of Klezmer music. Too vast to be covered in mere program notes, over a millenium of Yiddish Civilization is more intertwined with the mainstream history of what became modern day Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Western Russia, and the Czech Republic than we are ever taught. Because of forced migrations, Yiddish Civilization resonated far beyond Eastern Europe to affect the cultures of France and England, who enacted expulsions long before Spain. Jewish communities were variously welcomed and expelled throughout mittel-Europa for varying durations of time. Within this ebb and flow of acceptance and oppression, shafts of light stand out in high relief against a primarily dark historical canvas of persecution, violence, and ignorance.
Jewish counselors advised Dukes, Princes, Margraves, and Kings, while Christian theologians exchanged intellectual ideas with Rabbis. Jewish musicians flourished in the same Teutonic courts that employed minnesingers and Meistersingers, their survival subject to the ebb and flow of edicts dictating the duration of their welcomes and the severity of their exiles. Richard Wagner, whose lushly beautiful and hypnotic gesamtkunstwerks grew from a misunderstanding of history, helped to encourage a historical lie – that the villages and courts of his operas were sites of long-lost Utopias of pure German-ness. The 20th century deplorables who tuned their ideology to Wagner’s soundtrack pursued a fairy tale as substantive as an Alpine snow flake, engaging in genocide to recover an historical moment that never existed.
We invite you to listen to the many musical strands that wove together over centuries and emerged as Klezmer. There are both songs and instrumental music from the Glogauer Liederbuch (c. 1480) and Lochamer Liederbuch (c. 1450), late medieval musical collections that boast numerous Jewish themes which trace the intermingling of Jewish and German culture. There are selections from the 13th century Vatican Organum Treatise which lies in the Biblioteca Vaticana, serving as a compendium of melodies that wove their way into later sacred music, both Jewish and Muslim. There is a panoply of 15th century anonymous Polish and Czech song that would have been performed by Jewish musicians. There are songs of Jewish troubadors and Hebrew chants found in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. There are piyyutim, or Hebrew liturgical songs that would have been sung to trouvère, or popular melodies.
From the Cairo Geniza, a collection of some 300,000 Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic manuscript fragments found in the geniza or storeroom of a Cairo synagogue, we have works of Obadiah the Proselyte, an early 12th century Italian priest who converted to Judaism. Obadiah’s notation of Jewish chant in Gregorian notation provides us with a link to the oldest extant Jewish music that is documented.
