What is klezmer?
כּלי־זמרYiddishPronunciation: Jewish English Lexicon (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Klezmer (כּלי־זמר) is the instrumental celebration music of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe — historically the trade of professional wedding musicians called klezmorim (כּלי־זמרים). You can recognise it by its voice-like ornaments (the sobbing (קרעכץ) ), its — most famously (פֿרייגיש), with its augmented-second leap — and its dance forms: the freylekhs (פֿריילעכס) , the bulgar, the hora (horă) , the sher (שער).
Klezmer grew up around the Jewish wedding in the towns of Eastern Europe, absorbing the modes of synagogue prayer and the dance music of its Romanian, Ukrainian, and Ottoman neighbours. Carried to America in the great migration of 1881–1924, it was captured on 78rpm records in New York, nearly silenced by assimilation and the Holocaust, and revived from the 1970s into a global genre. What makes a tune sound like klezmer is a stack of layers — mode, ornament, groove, and form — which is exactly what this page will pull apart.
More on the history of klezmerWhat makes it klezmer
- 1ScaleThe collection of notes a melody and solo draw from.Coming soon
- 2RhythmWhere the weight sits — which beats are loud, which are silent on purpose.Coming soon
- 3FormThe repeating shape of a section — how many bars before it comes around again.Coming soon
- 4TextureHow the parts are layered: what plays the groove, what fills the space.Coming soon