Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (review)

Mark Slobin's Fiddler on the Move explores the klezmer revival of the last two decades as a protean Jewish, American, and international phenomenon. Chair of the Department of Music at Wesleyan University, Slobin has authored and edited many ethnomusicological studies.

Slobin asks how might we "study a constantly morphing and expanding musical system with no surviving homeland, as played by insiders with outsider mentalities and outsiders with uncanny intuitions about how the music works." In four central chapters he maps out working methodological territories, readily conceding that his "sources, examples, and insights intersect, jumping the temporary fences" he has erected (p. 5). As per Slobin's goal of the American Musicspheres series, he aims to "avoid defining musical 'villages,' to move away from neat periodization, and to give terms like 'folk,' 'traditional,' 'ethnic,' and 'popular' a well-deserved rest" (Forward). This larger series goal turns out to be an interesting part of his specific klezmer story.

Slobin suggests that "heritage is the emerging word of choice for identification through presumed historical connection." Thus the term traditional is often displaced by a word that politically "helps people to avoid sensitive terms like ethnicity or minority, which overlap it" (p. 13). Traditional and ethnic are words that Slobin, as editor, wants to put out to pasture. He suggests that heritage is now considered more upbeat than ethnicity. It is non-controversial, a term of pride. But the politics of keywords and codewords are unstable. Several decades after World War II the euphemism gap between tradition and race was filled using terms like culture, community, and ethnicity. Fencing with affiliational keywords continues.

Slobin's hybrid micromusics draw from and contribute to one another and to the dominant commodified music of the superculture. Micromusics form, in Slobin's metaphor, a system of intersecting spheres, each of which is permeable at its edges, but hard and clear at its center. Heritage music, including klezmer, constitutes a currently active type of micromusic. Slobin lays out a "typology of heritage musics" (p. 13), aligned in national, exotic, diasporic, and transnational categories.

Slobin makes clear that klezmer cannot readily be categorized as "national" in the sense that applies to Hungarian or Irish music. The contemporary klezmer revival has been mainly an American phenomenon, but it draws explicitly on earlier European and American Jewish practices.

As an "exotic" heritage music, klezmer fits ambiguously into European expectations. Klezmer refracts difficult issues of European Jewishness through the lens of klezmer's American base. Exotic music from the United States has not, previously, been perceived as recycled European culture. Within the American context, Slobin suggests that "old and remodeled traditions" like ragtime, folk songs, or blues can readily be taken up as heritage musics.

Among "traditional transnational" musics, Slobin designates heritage musics like klezmer as "subcommodified." What does this mean? "There are no major record label deals here, no arena concerts, no massive sale of T-shirts and memorabilia" (p. 32) [my emphasis]. Levels of commodification seem to be morally charged. So at what point does massive shade off into bupkis? Is selling out committed in the heart, the act, the result, or in the spin?

Chapter three of Fiddler "grapples with some of the driving forces behind klezmer affiliation, especially for the musicians who invest their creativity, energy, and time into this subcommodified, tenuous line of work" (p. 37). Klezmer groups record primarily to promote themselves, not for sales, writes Slobin. But if gigs led to sales, would it be so terrible? Slobin notes that, as a marketing strategy, all kinds of Jewish bands call themselves klezmer musicians. Subcommodified klezmer may be; but success is relative, and the klezmer boomlet has looked inviting to many musicians. Musicians try to catch a good wave, be it blues, disco, folk, or klezmer. Interview material with four female...