Chasing Yiddishkayt: A Concerto in the Context of Klezmer Music

Abstract

Chasing Yiddishkayt: Music for Accordion, Klezmorim Concertino, Strings, and Percussion is a four-movement composition that combines the idioms of klezmer music with aspects of serialism. I aimed to infuse the piece with a sense of yiddishkayt: a recognizable, rooted Jewishness. In order to accomplish this goal, I based each movement on a different klezmer style. I used the improvisatory-style of the Romanian Jewish doina as the foundation for Movement 1. For Movements 2 through 4 I selected tunes from the 1927 Hoffman Manuscript-a fake-book assembled by Joseph Hoffman in Philadelphia for his son, Morris-as the starting point in my process, and also for the generation of pitch material. Each movement places the tunes in a different serialist context through the use of abstraction, manipulation and regeneration. The orchestration of the composition is designed as a modified a concerto structure that alternates between featuring the accordion and contrasting the klezmorim concertino (fiddle, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, and accordion) with the orchestra. Depending on the context, the percussion section functions as part of the concertino and the orchestra. In the monograph, I place the composition in a historical and musical context. In Chapter 1, I trace my travels to Kraków, Poland for the Jewish Culture Festival, where I began to explore and understand the intricate language of this music. In Chapter 2, I provide a summary of the history of klezmer music by looking at it through the context of a musical style that has developed across regional and cultural boundaries, and has drawn influences as far and wide as the Turkish maqam system in Constantinople, to the Moldavian Roms (Gypsies), to czarist Military bands, to jazz and swing, and to rock and roll. I conclude the chapter with a brief survey of four contemporary klezmer musicians of the new generation. In Chapter 3, I look at the modal structure of klezmer music. I used the work of Joshua Horowitz as the starting point for my research on various modal progressions and tetrachords. I then applied this research by analyzing a set of thirty freilechs in the Hoffman manuscript. In Chapter 4, I present an analysis of my composition as well as historical background for the tunes that I used as source material. I outline my future research goals in Chapter 5.