Klezmer ─ Music, History, and Memory

Klezmer is the first comprehensive study of the musical structure and social history of klezmer music--the music of the Jewish musicians' guild of Eastern Europe. Emerging in 16th century Prague, the klezmer became a central cultural feature of the largest transnational Jewish community of modern times--the Ashkenazim of Eastern Europe-until the decades following World War I. Author Walter Zev Feldman treats the major sources in relevant languages-principally Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Romanian--from the 16th to the 20th centuries, including interviews with authoritative European-born klezmorim, conducted over a period of more than thirty years in America, Eastern Europe and Israel. Including musical analysis, the book draws upon the foundational collections of the late Tsarist and early Soviet periods, plus rare cantorial and klezmer manuscripts from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. Klezmer reveals the artistic transformations of the liturgy of the Ashkenazic synagogue in klezmer wedding melodies, and presents the most extended study available in any language of the relationship of Jewish dance to the rich and varied klezmer music of Eastern Europe. The complex of speech, dance, and musical gesture is deeply rooted in Jewish expressive culture, and reached its highest development in Eastern Europe. Much of the musical and choreographic history of the Ashkenazim is embedded in the klezmer repertoire, which functioned as a kind of non-verbal communal memory.

Walter Zev Feldman is a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music. During the 1970s he spearheaded the revival of klezmer music. His book, Music of the Ottoman Court (Berlin, 1996) is taught as a basic text world wide. He is also an authority on East European Jewish dance, forming part of his current research on the role of gesture in the performing arts.