Zoë Aqua’s Transylvanian Fantasy
Klezmer musician Zoë Aqua has just released a brand-new video, the second in a series documenting her 2024 Transylvania Synagogue Tour. While the Colorado-native Aqua has been active as a performer and recording artist for the last decade, featured in the popular but now-disbanded Brooklyn-based klezmer group Tsibele, this video series is the latest in a recent outpouring of solo material. From 2021-23, Aqua was a Fulbright scholar in Romania, living in Cluj and working as a folklorist studying folk music traditions in the multi-ethnic Transylvania region and developing relationships with elder fiddle players with whom she studied and conducted field research. Like her recent album In Vald Arayn (Borscht Beat 2022), the Transylvania Synagogue Tour video series reflects Aqua’s expertise in a range of Eastern European vernacular musics and the deepening of her artistry in response to immersion in a world of elder culture bearers and hard-core revivalists in the Transylvanian music scene.
Today’s video release “Schwartz- Royt Fantaziye” was recorded live in concert in Satu Mare, Romania. Her five-piece band on this track is stripped down to a trio. It features Romanian musicians Szopos Kálmán on the brácsa, a local variant on the viola with a flat bridge to facilitate chordal accompaniment, and Dénes Károly on the bass.
In a recent interview, Aqua discussed her new video with me and how it fits in to her larger project as artist and activist in new Yiddish culture. Schwartz- Royt Fantaziye is modeled on a dance music style associated with Szék, an ethnic Hungarian town in Transylvania that has come to be viewed as of particular interest and importance by Hungarian musicians in the táncház folk music revival movement (shvarts-royt, meaning “black-red” in Yiddish, are the colors associated with the town). Szék is a small town near Cluj, the major city of Transylvania. The town was well known for maintaining rigorous turf distinctions between its three different neighborhoods, each with its own string band led by a virtuosic prímás, or lead violinist, and with ensembles always consisting of trios, fiddle, brácsa and bass.
Táncház revivalist musicians have developed an ideology of purity relating to the specific suite of dances and rhythms associated with different towns and regions. The current ideal of the Szék tradition is based on evidence from field recordings and elder local musicians, few who are still living. Aqua told me that she has taken great pains to try to adhere to the norms and expectations of a traditional Széki dance suite, even as she composed her own original melodies that are infused with the language of klezmer. She worked carefully with her ethnic-Hungarian bandmates to ensure that the rhythmic language of the song would not jar against the rhythmic sensibilities of the source material she references.
Aqua suggested that rhythmic sensibility is the most important aspect of playing this music. “Transylvanian music is more about groove, and about the division of labor between the instrumentalists. What is the role of the prímás? The brácsa always plays chords. It’s like you are building a machine that makes people feel like they have to dance.” Aqua hopes to develop this piece into a larger project of creating a personal version of the long form Széki dance suite. For her as an outsider to the world of Transylvanian music, creating a new piece in this highly specific regional style is a piece of audacity that she has pulled off with assurance.
Aqua expressed a respect for the rules governing the Széki Suite and the seriousness of revivalists for whom regional vernacular music traditions have taken on some of the structures of a classical tradition. She notes that klezmer, a parallel musical tradition from the region, lacks the regional specificity of other Eastern European folkloric traditions—presumably due to the discontinuity which famously troubles Jewish culture in the era after the Holocaust. Aqua desires rigor and formalism in the klezmer revival that she finds so appealing in the táncház scene, even as she recognizes that the kind of reconstruction needed to achieve this is not possible due to the lack of reliable evidence about the sounds of klezmer in the pre-Holocaust era.
For Aqua, her background in klezmer is both a problem and a generative source for her imaginative creativity. Klezmer, as a form of “traditional music” is in a permanent state of partialness and is missing elements that Aqua seeks, and that she has taken active steps to find in related folk art forms. At the same time, klezmer provides her with a platform to register her identity as a Jewish person of Eastern European descent into a localized conversation about culture and preservation. She has been deeply touched by the aggressive traditionalism of the regional music scene she has immersed herself in and is seeking to find a way to assert Jewishness in geographies where Jews once played a major role in the constellation of ethnic communities. “I don’t want to hit people over the head, but this was an entire civilization. I want to be like, we’re here too. Eastern European Jewish culture is important. Diaspora Jewish culture is important. We have a right to be in historic Jewish spaces.”
As has been noted by scholar of performance studies Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and others, the klezmer revival is a musical genre of recent origin that makes reference to the past, claiming the pedigree of heritage to support creative projects that to varying degrees engage with archival sources. The dialectic of new and old in klezmer is made audible in the work of the pioneers of klezmer revival. New York-based artists in the 1980s such as the Klezmatics and David Krakauer situated their work in the landscape of American music and the downtown avant-garde, creating a version of Jewish wedding dance music that was receptive to the influence of jazz, funk and other contemporary idioms.
At roughly the same time, a parallel but somewhat less well-known cadre of American Jewish musicians who were also seeking to reclaim their ethnic heritage through Eastern European Jewish instrumental folk music sought out still-practiced folk traditions in Europe as models for their creative endeavors. Transylvania has taken on a special role in the American klezmer revival scene, offering a different set of aesthetic guidelines than what is typically associated with the post-1980s klezmer sound, rooted in the fiddle styles of local wedding musicians. As I wrote about in an earlier blog post this year, Transylvania is an economically challenged area that has historically retained an association with peasant life. Folklorists dating back to Béla Bartók have looked to Transylvania as a source for what they believed to be musical traditions that were untarnished by urbanization and transnational music trends. Since the 1970s, musicians and activists in the Hungarian táncház folk music revival movement have established networks of music camps and venues of performance in Transylvania that are more or less accessible to American musicians. Aqua is a figure in what is already a third wave of Jewish American musicians associated with klezmer revival working as folklorists and performers in the region, following her friend and mentor Bob Cohen who has been living in Budapest since the 1980s, and klezmer violinist Jake Shulman-Ment who studied and lived in Transylvania starting in the early-2000s, among others.
Transylvania has historically been home to multiple ethnic groups, including Hungarians, Roma, Saxons (a German ethnic group), Romanians and Jews. Jewish Americans are among many groups who have sought to discover “roots” in the musical traditions of this regions. Among the ethnic groups still living in the region (Jews and Germans are mostly absent from Transylvania in the present day), Hungarians and Romanians have mostly ceased to maintain music as a family trade, as was the norm until the mid-20th century, but were never the main professional musicians in the region. Roma musicians typically occupied this professional niche. There are a handful of prominent Roma musician families that continue to practice intergenerational music transmission and work as wedding musicians. But in the current folk music ecology of Transylvania, revivalists play a dominant role. For Hungarian and Romanian folk revivalists, music and ethnicity are tightly bound together into a certain ethos of conservation and traditionalism.
While some elder musicians in the region may still have memories of Jewish people and their music, the sense of Jews as being part of the fabric of life and culture has mostly been forgotten. Aqua described to me the reactions she found to her klezmer music among her generational peers in Transylvania as being ambivalent at best. Some musicians simply identify sounds of klezmer as “Romanian music,” perhaps responding to the affinity between klezmer and Moldavian folk styles. Others castigate the music as “simple,” negatively assessing the restrained harmonic vocabulary of Jewish folk melodies, or comment on the perceived corniness of a stereotyped repertoire of emotionally limited sentimental clarinet-based American klezmer. The absence of a prestigious and legitimate role for a Jewish artist in the appraisal of the ethnicity-driven scene of Transylvanian folk revivalists has steered Aqua to seek mastery of regionally specific skill sets that are valued by local musicians, proving her worth in a scene where she is an outsider. At the same time, she seeks to fulfill her self-assigned task of creating a Jewish voice within this musical landscape through creative projects. Her Transylvania Synagogue Tour project addresses both of these goals.
Aqua told me in an interview that the initial impetus to embark on this project was our concert that we performed together in March 2023 in the synagogue of the town of Mihalyfalva (known in Romanian as Valea lui Mihai, and in Hungarian as Érmihályifalva), where my grandmother was born. This was a very special event, organized by the last Jewish couple who lived in the town. Jews from the region gathered to hear us play klezmer, Yiddish songs and cantorial music in a communal space where there had been no such presentation of Jewish culture in a long time. However, as Aqua noted in our conversation (and as I found last summer during a tour of Jewish heritage sites in Romania) our experience in Mihalyfalva of connecting to local Jews was something of an outlier.
The synagogue in Mihalyfalva on the night of the concert
Most synagogues in Transylvania are barely functional as Jewish religious communities. Many of the buildings have been abandoned, or have come to be owned by non-Jewish people and used as cultural centers, some with minimal presence of Jewish heritage in their organizational principles and practical use. On her tour, Aqua played in synagogues in Bistrița, Satu Mare, and Sighetu Maramației (Sighet). The current non-Jewish owners of the Bistrița synagogue renovated the dilapidated structure around 20 years ago, fixing the roof and driving out the birds that were nesting there. The synagogue is now used primarily as a venue for classical music. In their renovation of the space, the new owners unceremoniously covered over some of the original historic wall decorations with gold leaf, “to raise the value of the building,” but also making the bima (pulpit) of the synagogue appear more like a Romanian Orthodox Church. The fact that the owners shared this with Aqua without embarrassment indicates that preservation is not an important part of the concept guiding their custodianship of a historic site of a dispossessed minority community. The synagogues Aqua played in Satu Mare and Sighet still maintain active Jewish communities but with small congregations that can no longer fill the spaces designed to hold hundreds of people. Jews in Eastern Europe have come to play a role as a cultural asset in their absence, with their intellectual and physical property now useful to the descendants of their former neighbors. What role living Jews and their culture can play in the spaces of old Jewish communities is a more challenging question to approach.
Aqua’s tour of these spaces functioned as a temporary Jewish reclamation of heritage sites, a figurative and sonic repair, and an act of overture to the musical world of Transylvania that she has been in dialogue with as student and practitioner. Her project is framed around painful questions about Jewish identity in contemporary Eastern European, but the answers she is presenting are more capacious and joyful. The Transylvania Synagogue Tour project outlines both the aesthetic benefits and conceptual challenges of her “secondary education” in Transylvanian folk music. The product of this experiment is a tentative summation of her last few years of artistic development. The music outlines a set of potential pedagogical pathways for the international klezmer community, rooted in the aesthetics of Transylvanian folk revivalists. It also conveys Aqua’s ambitions to assert herself, and, perhaps, the presence of Jewishness, in the music communities she has been working with in Romania. Aqua told me, “I’m an outsider. Maybe some people find it annoying, but by and large I’ve gotten positive response.”
Speaking of her audiences and her aesthetic goals, Aqua appeals to the sociality the music. She accents the communicative aspects of performance, and its potentials to create experiences of physicality and joy: “I want to give them the impetus to want to dance. I’m less interested in a set of listening music. It’s great to play for dancers.”
Works Cited/Further Reading
Zoë Aqua, “Zoë’s Fulbright Blog,” Blog. https://www.zoeaqua.com/blog
Philip Vilas Bohlman, Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (New York: Routledge, 2010).
Bob Cohen, “Dumneazu: Ethnomusicological Eating East of Everywhere.” Blog. https://horinca.blogspot.com/
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Sounds of Sensibility,” in Mark Slobin, ed., American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Jake Shulman-Ment, “Travels,” Blog. https://www.jakeshulmanment.com/jake-shulman-ment-travels