Budowitz is considered the "early music" ensemble of klezmer music. How do you perceive yourselves?
"Even as recently as the 16th Century, the entire violin family occupied a socially and musically low position. From the 16th till the late 19th Century, though, the violin was the quintessentially "Jewish" instrument. It was played by amateurs as well as by professionals. The violinist was usually the head of the kapelye. When several violins were present in an ensemble, they would be split up accordingly: the ershter (first) fiddle played the high melody, the tsveyter (second) fiddle played a second supporting heterophonic version of the melody, often in the lower octave; and the fturke, or secunda fiddle played a rhythmic accompaniment with double-stops. It was generally the violin that played the solo pieces for guests at the table. He also got paid the most."
When does the clarinet come in?
"The clarinet really began to take hold among Jews in the 2nd half of the 19th Century, later than commonly believed. It originally may have come, not from the classical milieu, but through the Transylvanian/Hungarian Taragota. For Jews in the 18th and early 19th Century Ukraine, instrumentation was divided into 2 official legal categories, which were stubbornly enforced by authorities: "loud" and "soft." The instruments in the category of loud music were drums and horns: soft music included strings and flutes (which were made of wood, then). Jews were only allowed to play soft music. The laws strictly determined the instrumentation, the amount of musicians in a group, the duration of an event, and even the amount of dances to be played in an evening. If a Jew broke one of these laws, he could be prohibited from playing another event for up to a year. Under the Muscovite system loud music was mainly performed for two high social classes: the nobility and the merchant/artisan class. Kapelyes usually consisted of string instruments and flutes up to the mid-19th Century, with the average size of an ensemble being 3-5 musicians. Clarinets, brass instruments and drums came later. So, in spite of the affection that Jews had for the violin, playing a clarinet in the late 19th Century might have represented an elevation in their general social status. Klezmorim in the late 19th Century seem to have commonly played the c- and e-flat clarinet, though clarinets were produced in just about every key. We also prefer the c-clarinet, in spite of its acoustic imperfections, which actually lend it a lot of color. It can have a nice whining character, so its perfect for Jewish music."
The Jewish tsimbl is played very rarely now. How important was the tsimbl for klezmorim?
"In the regions of eastern Galicia, Poland, Bukovina and Belorussia, the tsimbl was extremely popular among Jews as early as the 16th Century. The earliest available document of the presence of klezmorim in Moldavia is of a tsimblist: In 1744, Shlomo, the Jewish tsimbalist of Iasi, received a tax exemption as a result of having played for the Prince. its obvious when you look at all the iconography and writings about Jewish music that the tsimbl was a very widespread instrument among the Jews from the 16th to the 20th Century. The Romanian researcher, Filimon, wrote 140 years ago that the Jews brought the tsimbl into Romania. Of course, Gypsies and Hungarians will tell you that they brought it there. To avoid having that discussion escalate into another ethnic war, realize that the tsimbl has probably been around, in some form or another, longer than any of us have called ourselves Jews, Gypsies, Hungarians, or anything else. Sometimes tsimblists were called klappzimmerer, which you could translate as "trap-thresher." The term itself sounds like the striking of a tsimbl. In the 18th Century, the slang expression, klaffzimmer meant piano, but klappzimmerer may also have come from the Rotwelsch term, klappsmann, meaning imbecile. Even in Polish, you can still insult someone by saying, "ty cymbale!" (you idiot!). No further comment. The tsimbl is actually a very flexible instrument which is able to hold its own as a melodic or as an accompanying instrument. Tsimbls used to be strung with thinner strings and less tension, in contrast to the Hungarian-Romanian cymbaloms of today, which use piano wire strung with a barbaric tension of 40-50 kilos per string. That production tendency began in Hungary as an attempt to put the cymbalom on the concert stage in the 1870's. Like the bass, small tsimbls were more often than not going mercilessly out of tune. Tsimblists probably didn't even try to tune the 100-odd strings between pieces at a wedding, so I'm sure that the music then was hopelessly beyond the threshold of today's intonation standards."
Where does the construction of the Jewish tsimbl and its playing style come from?
"I designed my tuning on the basis of two 18th and19th Century historical models - Belorussian and Jewish-Ukrainian. Alfred Pichlmaier did a wonderful job reconstructing an historical instrument for me, also based on earlier European models. The finished product is the result of years of our combined research. The string tension is only 8-10 Kilos per string, so the tremolos are less differentiated, and the stroking techniques are sometimes based on violin bowing techniques. Those techniques have just developed through immersion in all kinds of Jewish music. I don't simply restrict myself to the available materials, though - there just aren't enough of them. Lots of new ideas just naturally grow out of working with the music all the time."
What gives your accordions their specific sound?
"It's amazing how much more you can ornament on these old ones. Our instruments were made in 1889 and at the turn of the century, which is ancient for an accordion, and the unrelenting work to restore them and get them working has really paid off. Their warmth comes mainly from the fact that the reeds are riveted to brass plates, rather than to aluminum or zinc, which eventually replaced brass. The reeds are also from a richer alloy than you find in modern reeds, and the goat leather used on the plates also adds warmth. We often get comments that they don't even sound like accordions, because they're so delicate and rich, and because they sometimes seem to "speak." The idea of the free-swinging reed and bellows-propelled air mass is actually very old, so the archaic sound we get fits really well into the concept of our sound. Our instruments are small and soft, yet it takes much more physical energy to play them than it does a modern accordion. Their inefficiency makes possible more nuance, because the lightly touched embellishment notes come out more faintly than on a modern accordion, where they're too crudely audible. The earliest model we have for our accordion style is Max Yankowitz, whose 1913 recordings gave us our foundation. There were other accordionists, too, and we've learned and gone beyond those examples. We base our sound and technique on the voice; our whole approach to fingering and bellows technique is geared toward producing the nuances of Yiddish singing. Like the early clavecin players before Bach, we basically use three fingers, though we include the thumb. The 4th finger is usually reserved as a krekhts finger, often touching the note above the main melody note to get that weeping thing, and the 5th finger is mostly used in emergencies'."
Ornamentation seems to be extremely important to klezmer music. Is there a relationship to, say, Baroque ornamentation?
"If there isn't, there should be. The entire gamut of the improvisational and ornamental gestures of the Baroque exists in klezmer music, sometimes called dreydlekh and shleyfer. The only thing missing is a treatise on the subject which would validate it, but because we're dealing with a style - or styles - which are predominantly "aurally" transmitted, there has never been a need to codify the whole system. Like early and pre-Baroque instrumental music, klezmer music derives its melodic ornamental style from vocal music, the difference being that the khazones and paraliturgical vocal style is the basis upon which klezmer music's gestures are built, and this includes a list of vocalisms which are verbatim replicas of weeping and sighing, called in Yiddish, krekhtsn. The early Baroque ornamental figure which is analogous to the basic krekhts is the Nachschlag, the difference being that the Nachschlag tone is heard in Baroque music, whereas in klezmer music it is stopped, or swallowed. This sounds similar to the sound made when you're weeping and your breath gets pushed out in thrusts. It would actually be fascinating to hear Baroque music played with these inflections. They would fit right into the entire construct of Baroque ornamentation, which was based on vocal models and rhetorics."
What about rhythm?"After observing the earliest European klezmer recordings, as well as classical recordings and myriad types of European and Middle Eastern folk music from that period, we noticed that the entire concept of rhythm has undergone a radical revolution in the past 90 years. I'll spell it out for you: The concept of a precise, regular, unchanging beat was basically foreign to the aesthetic sense of European musicians prior to the era of the domination of the commercial recording industry." (see photo, left. Budowitz learning irregular rhythmic habits).
Record companies are responsible for musical change?
"What, you're shocked? In the early years of 78 r.p.m. disc recordings, it was the medium itself, meaning: a limited amount of time to do your business - around 3 minutes per side - and a limited amount of out-takes. For musicians at that time, the idea of compressing your music into a 3-minute permanent corset was strange and new. You played a condensed version of your music as well as you could, and because you didn't have the opportunity to edit out your mistakes and there wasn't much of an opportunity to do repeats, you got all those charming flaws on the recordings. Nowadays, you can slice out just about any imperfection you want, and that proceeds ad infinitum. We've cleaned up so much that our aesthetic has changed right under our noses. When your makeup accomplishes miracles, your vanity increases. So, we've thrown out the baby with the bath water. The audience has gotten spoiled with musical cleanliness and the expectation of the sterile standard. The capability of correcting musical mistakes has become an industrial commandment. Some musical "blemishes" have their own power of expression, you know."
Does Budowitz intentionally play irregularly?
"Irregularity has merely become part of the way we play. Earlier music often dislocated melody from accompaniment so much, that there could be as much as half a beat discrepancy. That produces a beautiful type of rhythmic tension which you hardly get to hear any more. Lots of jazz, Latin American and Gypsy musicians still know how to play ahead or behind the beat, and we do a lot of that, especially in the smaller groupings of duos and trios within Budowitz. We have different ways of dealing with tempo and rhythm: sometimes we provide a fairly steady beat, against which the soloist lags or accelerates. Other times we provide a sort of unsteady pulse, actually playing the accompaniment not on the beats, but ahead or behind them. In that way, the beat itself is steady and you can feel it, but because you're not playing on it precisely, the effect is of unsteadiness. We call that implied beat. Then, we also actually accelerate and slow down sections or passages, sometimes returning to the original tempo, but often letting the music go its own way and not trying to compensate for the difference in tempi. It's interesting to read that klezmorim in the 17th Century were brutally criticized by outsiders for their inability to keep a steady beat.The rhythmic flexibility of klezmer music grew out of the dance, fluctuating capriciously and sometimes radically, depending on what was happening on the dance floor. That rhythmic flexibility is a pre-requisite. Sometimes the bobe (grandma) steps out and you have to back off on the tempo, and sometimes the dancers get the better of you and you have to jack it up several notches."
How do you work with melodic phrasing?
"Phrasing is one of those long lost parameters of improvisation. In the 19th Century, klezmorim improvised mainly through changing their phrasing, articulation and ornamentation. When you listen to the repeats of the sections in the earliest European recordings, there's not too much changing of the actual melody. But you do hear variations of embellishment, note grouping, and inflection. I think that's one of the main differences between earlier Jewish improvisation and how it's approached today; it used to happen on a much less outwardly perceivable level. Old Jewish music shuns total symmetry. Homogenization of phrasing, articulation and bowing in an ensemble never seems to have been an aesthetic musical criterium. The jaggedness of the melodic phrasing is what made the music danceable, too. Dance music was the ideal for instrumental music, even when the music was intended for listening. When you're playing for listening, the same jaggedness is there, but the music sounds perhaps even more closely related to speech rhythm. In our workshops, our students have the most difficulty varying their phrasings. But once they start to "shuffle and deal" their groupings around, they can't stop, and we actually have to remind them not to become too wildly asymmetric."
What is Budowitz' secret toward harmonizing?
"The secret is that we don' (photo, left, shows Budowitz in the process of not harmonizing a tune). This music is non-harmonic by nature, which doesn't mean that harmonies don't occur - they do, but we don't try to fit a melody into a harmony, and we don't try to soften dissonances by pillowing them with consonant harmonies. The modes of Jewish music contain natural dissonances. Much of the melodic tension you hear in an ensemble occurs as a result of the friction between a dissonant melody note against the bass. If you harmonize this with consonance, you miss that beautiful tautness. In a broad sense, everything in early klezmer music derives from the melody. Our accompaniment figures grow directly out of the melody, making the arrangements as diversified as the melodies themselves. We get a lot of melody couplings that way, in different octaves and at different times, which is a very essential facet of the early klezmer ensemble sound. We're not strict about this, though; sometimes we go for the straightforward village idiot accompaniment of one chord per section, which creates some nice plebeian dissonances. It's funny, you know, we've actually begun to view richly harmonized klezmer melodies as vulgar, whereas catatonically bucking and grinding out a G-minor chord for 24 bars doesn't phase us. We're always juggling the rhythm, though, so even if that G-minor chord isn't the latest fad, we're not bored, because something's happening somewhere in the music. I guess it's no secret anymore, is it?"
How closely is klezmer music related to the folk music of these other regions and peoples?
"Inseparably. But now there are so few Jews left in most of those countries, that the fruitful interaction which you found earlier hardly exists. It's a well-known fact that Jews and Gypsies played for and with each other and often shared repertoire and were able to play each other's styles as well. We often play with Gypsy friends of ours in eastern Europe who still know some Jewish repertoire - though they don't really know the style - and with other East European folk musicians, too. We also play some of the non-Jewish pieces from the former East European co-territorial repertoire, like Ukrainian kolomeykes and Romanian sirbas. On the one hand, it's an anachronism to do that, but when you look at how the styles fed into each other, you have to dig into them if you want to understand how your own music works. The same dynamics of musical interaction and change are still happening today. You can understand them just by looking at what most klezmer bands are doing, mixing Jewish music with jazz, rock, Middle Eastern - whatever. It's the same process, just exchange the variables."
You talk about your music like musicologists.
"Only because you ask about it like one. Actually, all of us have survived classical training and are miraculously still able to play. The saving factor being that we've all gotten dirty enough playing lots of different styles in every imaginable situation. We're all street players as well as concert players, and we've done the wedding shtick over and over."
Interview from the Cd “Mother Tongue”, Koch International Records
Budowitz