Tsvey Strunes: Two Violins Speak
Ahead of the release of their new album Two Strings/Tsvey Strunes, I had the opportunity to speak with Jake Shulman-Ment and Abigale Reisman, two leading violinists in the North American klezmer music scene. The album is an exciting development in the collaboration between these two artists. The unusual interplay between the “double lead” violin parts that characterize most of the music on the record represents a formal innovation in klezmer. Rather than alternating lead parts, the two violins are in almost constant dialogue, exchanging melodic center and heterophonic variation in unpredictable ways, producing moments of inspired friction, improvisatory thematic development and virtuosity that is a joy to listen to. The record, to be released on June 3, also features Pete Rushefsky on tsimbl, cellist Raffi Boden, and special guest spots from clarinetist Zoe Christiansen and percussionist Richie Barshay.
Reisman and Shulman-Ment discussed their commitment to creativity within a framework of historically informed performance. The string band sound heard on the record is indicative of their focus on historical forms of Jewish instrumental wedding music in Europe. This turn in klezmer stylistic approach intentionally eschews the musical changes the music underwent in the American context, and yet is a distinctive feature of contemporary American klezmer performance and discourse.
One theme that stuck out to me in our talk was the thorniness of defining traditionalism within a musical form that is by its nature revivalist. The klezmer of the first wave revival was oriented towards creating a new set of meanings and practices out of a repertoire that was (with a few important exceptions) no longer actively performed. Klezmer music, in the current usage of the term, began in the United States in the 1970s and 80s with bands in New York (the Klezmatics being the most prominent example) and on the West Coast founded by musicians whose background was in jazz, classical performance, the folk scene, and other American popular idioms. For first wave klezmer revivalists, the discovery of old Yiddish records and connections to a handful of elder Jewish musicians helped them initiate a music scene that was heavily rooted in the sounds and rhythms of jazz and popular music. On American klezmer and Yiddish records from the 1920s-40s that inspired first wave klezmer revival, the clarinet played a signature role as lead instrument and band arrangements with swing-style rhythm sections were prominent. These immigrant-era American klezmer bands were already highly influenced by jazz, encouraging klezmer revival players to conceive of hybridity, jazz-oriented arrangements featuring improvised solos, and American rhythms as essential elements in their tradition. For the first wave of klezmer revival, claiming Yiddish folk music of any kind was in itself considered a radical statement in the context of an American Jewish community entrenched in a process of embourgeoisement and acculturation. The association of klezmer with a radical politic was one of the defining features of the scene.
Reisman and Shulman-Ment are solidly in the second generation of musicians in the klezmer revival, or revitalization, movement (I will refrain from a discussion of the different shades in meaning between these two terms, revival and revitalization, and use them interchangeably here). The first generation of activist musicians in the movement created the conditions for younger artists to approach klezmer as a style ready made for a variety of aesthetic approaches, and in need of further nuance in staking out the parameters of traditionalism. For the second generation of players, a 19th and early 20th century style of klezmer focused on fiddle traditions and string bands is understood as representing an earlier stratum of the music. Recordings of violin and tsimbl duets, a delicate and haunting timbral combination featuring virtuosic Jewish violinists born in the Russian Empire, Poland and Romania hold a special pride of place for Reisman, Shulman-Ment and many of their peers. The “old world” fiddle sound is represented by violinists such as Jacob Gegna (1879-1944), Josef Solinski (dates unknown), Leon Ahl (dates unknown), Max Leibowitz (1884-1942), Abe Schwartz (1881-1963), Leon Schwartz (1901-1990), as well as more recent artists such as the Kovaci family of Roma fiddlers active in preserving the Jewish musical traditions of Maramures, Romania.
These previously obscure records have been made more widely available through the musical activism of Kurt Bjorling, a record collector, musicologist and klezmer musician who has played an important role as researcher in the revivalist community, among others. Bjorling has also worked as a collaborator with Reisman and Shulman-Ment. The total corpus of klezmer tunes has vastly expanded in the past decade through the collecting and disseminating efforts of the Klezmer Institute and its flagship Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project, which has made remarkable progress publicizing previously unknown Jewish melodies collected in the Pale of Settlement through a grassroots campaign to digitally transcribe 19th and early 20th century ethnographic musical manuscripts. Klezmer Institute executive director Christina Crowder estimates that this newly revealed corpus of music has increased the number of pieces of pre-Holocaust klezmer repertoire by five-fold. Reisman and Shulman-Ment have made use of these sources in creating the music for their new album.
Reisman stressed the total increase in knowledge about klezmer music in the past twenty years. “We know more now. The scene is so alive with discovery, sharing it on Facebook, in online archives, in Zev Feldman’s book(Klezmer: Music, History and Memory). We have a lot more information, source recordings. Kurt was finding these records in estate sales. When I came into the scene, we had more solo violin music. We knew more about the old country…If we’re looking at the beginning of the revitalization versus now, is there more traditional sounding music? I think maybe there is more string music and that sounds more traditional.”
Shulman-Ment positioned himself as a second wave klezmer artist in more ways than one. He studied as a young person with klezmer violinist and Klezmatics co-founder Alicia Svigals. In an anecdote about his teenage years, he reminisced about Svigals hearing him play and thinking it was a recording of herself. This formative influence was so profound that he says he needed to work over the years to transcend his impulse to imitate Svigals’ sound in order to find his own voice as an instrumentalist. Shulman-Ment told me, “I came of age playing klezmer, which is pretty different from people in the revitalization scene who came before, who were discovering, uncovering. I was a little kid with it in my ears and fingers. I’m not thinking about klezmer music. I’m just playing music…I think the newness you can hear in a traditional [art form] comes from that. I’m just playing the music.
For Shulman-Ment, achieving a traditionalist klezmer sound is something he approached in part through travels in countries where Jews in pre-Holocaust Europe were active in musical cultures, including Romania, where he lived and traveled on and off for a decade, as well as Hungary, Greece and Moldova. His immersions in fiddle traditions in these countries was paired with a methodical approach to learning. He recalled his process including, “Copying as closely as possible bowing, fingering, ornamentation, phrasing, adding it to your palette. It’s this style from a range of geographies, temporalities, migrations, and melded into this thing called klezmer. Recordings and people from both sides of the ocean.”
Yet the balance of the geography that Reisman and Shulman-Ment reference seem to lean towards the other side of the ocean. I asked the two artists if they see their music as being American. Shulman-Ment offered, “America is just a fact. I almost don’t think about it. I grew up as a New York musician. Even though I’m not trained as a jazz musician, I’m often in jazz situations. The amount of improvisation on the record probably reflects America.”
Reisman suggested that rather than an American musical frame of reference, the contemporary sounds she draws on are European. “When I am modeling my playing, I tend to be thinking into Eastern Europe. My context would be contemporary Romania. I don’t tend to look to the New York klezmer scene for inspiration in my playing. I’m modeling after this old country style, also because of the repertoire we’re playing.”
While the focus of the album is on the decisively unique and powerful instrumental performances of the two violinists, Reisman and Shulman-Ment each take an outing as singer on the record, performing elegiac new songs in Yiddish. Reisman sings “Zingendik,” her own composition based on a poem by Zishe Weinper (1893-1957), Yiddish author and leftist activist. She told me, “During the pandemic I wanted a melody that would speak to what was happening.” The poem speaks to a politic of vulnerability and tentative hopefulness: “Singing, the world consoles itself/And through song our clenched fist opens up.”
Shulman-Ment sings, “Shiker Fun Bitern Emes,” (Drunk from the Bitter Truth) a song based on a poem by Anna Margolin (1887–1952). He noted that the two songs “have a similar or complimentary message of light in the face of darkness. They are so Yiddish. There’s no victory yet they are victorious by accepting defeat. They work with the awfulness and the suffering to create the glow of life.” Reisman emphasized the point of the importance of Yiddish language and literature to their project: “We felt good about Yiddish being heard on the record.”
The Yiddish title of the album, Tsvey Strunes, refers to an alternate tuning for the fiddle with octaves on the top strings that is considered emblematic of an old Jewish fiddle style in the klezmer community. Jake’s performance of a piece using the tsvey strunes tuning is a pastiche of pieces by Abe Schwartz and Art Shryer’s Yiddish Orchestra.
In tension with its present-day status as an icon of old Jewish sound, the tsvey strunes tuning is only heard on a handful of old records. This example of a paucity of evidence of musical practices is indicative of the challenge to historically informed performance in the klezmer movement, and of the role of imaginative selectivity in identifying what artifacts will stand for tradition. As Kay Shelemay noted in her study of the adjacent world of the classical early music scene, historically informed performance is a new music practice that uses the symbolic language of historicity to support creative music projects that are deeply embedded in contemporary aesthetics. Beyond this basic fact of temporality, that logically renders “early” music contemporary by virtue of its present-day creation, Yiddish culture is further troubled by the discontinuities rendered by the Holocaust, American assimilation, and Zionism. Any act of historical recreation is by necessity an act of improvisation and faith in the veracity of a frail bread crumb of clues about the past.
If the first wave of klezmer revival was radically political in its push back against the disappearance of Yiddish culture, perhaps it is in its insistence on klezmer as art for art’s sake that second wave klezmer musicians have found their radicalism. Ultimately it is their investment in a generative and formally complex creative musical approach that is the source of the “authenticity” that I hear in Two Strings.
The dialogue in Reisman and Shulman-Ment’s violin duo evinces a roughhewn energy and creative insight above and beyond its potential utility as a work of scholarly recreation. Shulman-Ment identified the communicative power of this musical dialogue and suggested that it responds to underlying potentials in the old melodic material. “Even within one melody, the melody is like a commentary on what went before. Each phrase builds.” Referencing Jewish hermeneutic traditions that treat text as accretive, with new commentaries supplementing and transforming the meaning of older texts, Shulman-Ment seemed to be placing both old klezmer repertoire and his work with Reisman in the historical cast of dialogic Torah study. The two artists are in productive debate with each other and with their “Torah,” the body of old klezmer melodies. The religious metaphor is backed up by the reverential attitude of their work, reflected both in the life-long rigorousness of their technique and in the depth of familiarity with the music, the lived-in quality of playfulness and inspiration that animates their performances.
Shulman-Ment and Reisman will celebrate the release of their record at Joe’s Pub on June 3.
Works Cited/Further Reading
Kay Shelemay, “Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds,” Ethnomusicology 45 no. 1 (2001).
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Sounds of Sensibility,” Judaism 47 no. 1 (1998).
Walter Zev Feldman, Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).