American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots

6. Bulgărească/Bulgarish/Bulgar: The Transformation of a Klezmer Dance Genre

84 Like Jews in many parts of the world, the Jews of eastern Europe had families whose hereditary occupation was the performance of music. However, unlike any Jewish group that has been documented in the twentieth century, the hereditary Jewish musicians of eastern Europe, called klezmorim (singular, klezmer) performed an instrumental repertoire that included musical genres not shared by the co-territorial musicians . The klezmer repertoire included both dance and nondance genres. The dance genres as they appear in both the European and American notated documents and recordings display a remarkable uniformity over a very wide geographical area. While there probably was considerable variation in the nondance genres, the dance genres, especially those secular genres that were considered to be Jewish, were basically uniform over most of the areas of Jewish settlement within the Russian Empire, including eastern Ukraine, Belorussia (Belarus), Lithuania, eastern Poland , and Bessarabia (Moldavia, Moldova).1 Significant amounts of material remain for the Jews under czarist rule, for the Kingdom of Romania , and for Austrian Bucovina and Galicia, which together constituted the large majority of eastern Europe’s Jews during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within the repertoire of klezmer music in eastern Europe, the bulgarish was a regional phenomenon, originating in Bessarabia as the bulga ̆rească, and then spreading as the klezmer bulgarish to parts of Eastern Ukraine. In America between 1881 and 1920, however, the bulgarish chapter 6 Bulgărească/ Bulgarish/Bulgar The Transformation of a Klezmer Dance Genre walter zev feldman Bulgărească/Bulgarish/Bulgar 85 Figure 6.1 Wedding celebration, c. 1950. From left: Irving Gratz, Dave Tarras , Mrs. Gratz, and Sammy Musiker. Courtesy of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. became increasingly identified as a major genre of klezmer dance music for Jews of various regional backgrounds. The “klezmerization” of the bulgarish, then known as the bulgar, attained its final shape in New York City between 1920 and 1950. The European-born klezmorim who dominated the professional Jewish dance music of this city together created the new form of the bulgar. Among these musicians, the most influential was the Podolian clarinetist Dave Tarras (Dovid Tarrasiuk, 1897–1989). His influence took two forms: he composed a vast repertoire of bulgars that exemplified the new bulgar structure and that came to replace most of the Jewish bulgarish repertoire that had been brought from eastern Europe, and he composed tunes that combined the rhythmic and melodic features of the American Jewish bulgar with various Jewish musical genres.2 After World War II, the American conception of Jewish dance music centered around the bulgars (mostly of American vintage) and the new bulgar-hybrid melodies. The older core klezmer dance repertoire, which had been somewhat current in America until the 1940s and in eastern Europe until the contemporaneous Holocaust, was replaced almost en- 86 Walter Zev Feldman tirely by the new American klezmer genres, the bulgar and the bulgarhybrids . In this article, I trace the development of a single klezmer dance genre, from the bulgărească of the Moldavian lăutari (professional musicians), to the bulgarish of the Moldavian and Ukrainian klezmorim, and then to the bulgar of the klezmorim in the United States. I interpret the significance of this transformation, contrasting the situation in the Old World with the adaptation of this dance genre to suit the needs of the largely proletarianized Jewish immigrants in America during the first half of the twentieth century. In order to explain the significance of the bulgarish within American klezmer music, I introduce several points about the nature of klezmer professionalism and the composition of the klezmer repertoire , which may be summarized as follows. It appears that the repertoire of klezmer music had been created in both eastern Europe and America by full-time professional musicians who formed a hereditary caste. The amateur and part-time artisanmusicians do not seem to have taken an active role in the creation of the repertoire. In several regions, this caste of klezmorim had intimate contact with Gypsy professional musicians. The close professional contact of this klezmer caste with low-status non-Jews, plus the function of instrumental music as a means of exciting and releasing passionate emotions without any devotional context, put the klezmer and his music in a marginal position within Jewish society. When eastern European Jews emigrated in large numbers to the United States and Canada, the dance element within...