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The Book of Klezmer: the History, the Music, the Folklore from the 14th century to the 21st.

Article Excerpt
The book of Klezmer: The History, the Music, the Folklore from the 14th century to the 21st. By Yale Strom. Chicago: A Capella Books, 2002. [xvi, 381 p. ISBN 1-55652-445-5. $28.] Music examples, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, discography, index.

American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots. Edited by Mark Slobin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. [vi, 24,5 p. ISBN 0-520-22717-4. $49.95 (hbk.); ISBN 0-520-22718-2. $19.95 (pbk.).] Music examples, sources, index.

In the 1990s, while klezmer music asserted its place in the world music canon with an outpouring of bands, recordings, even hype, writing about the music was uneven and scanty. Resources included Mark Slobin's translation of Soviet ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski's prewar essays and transcriptions (Moshe Beregovski, Old Jewish Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski, ed. and trans. Mark Slobin [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982]), a handful of scholarly articles including Walter Feldman's authoritative study of the American bulgar and its roots (Walter Feldman, "Bulgareasca/ Bulgarish/Bulgar: The Transformation of a Klezmer Dance Genre," Ethnomusicology 38 [1994]: 1-35), Art Davidow's Klezmer Shack Web site (www.klezmershack.com, accessed 22 May 2003), and hundreds of largely uncritical (and often uninformed) music reviews and articles. The appearance of Henry Sapoznik's history of klezmer in 1999 was a welcome event (Henry, Sapoznik, Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World [New York: Schirmer Books, 1999]); it represented the beginning of a growing klezmer literature. The two recent contributions under consideration here are American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots, edited lay Mark Slobin, and The Book of Klezmer: the...

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