"Klezmer" is a Yiddish word for professional folk instrumentalist-the flutist, fiddler, and bass player that made brides weep and guests dance at weddings throughout Jewish eastern Europe before the culture was destroyed in the Holocaust, silenced under Stalin, and lost out to assimilation in America. Klezmer music is now experiencing a tremendous new spurt of interest worldwide with both Jews and non-Jews recreating this restless volatile, and vibrant musical culture. Firmly centered in the United States, klezmer has paradoxically moved back across the Atlantic as a distinctly "American"...

Across the United States, Jews come together every week to sing and pray in a wide variety of worship communities. Through this music, made by and for ordinary folk, these worshippers define and re-define their relationship to the continuity of Jewish tradition and the realities of American life.

Combining oral history with an analysis of recordings, The Lord's Song in a Strange Land examines this tradition incontemporary Jewish worship and explores the diverse links between the music and both spiritual and cultural identities. Alive with detail, the book focuses on metropolitan...

With notes and annotations that give insight into the larger story of the Jewish experience, this is a study of Yiddish folksongs of several types in both Yiddish and English.

Chosen Voices is the definitive survey of an often overlooked aspect of American Jewish history and ethnomusicology and an insider's look at a profession that is also a vocation.

Week after week, year after year, Jews turn to sacred singers for spiritual and emotional support. The job of the hazzan -- much more than the traditional "messenger to God" -- is deeply embedded in cultural, social, and religious symbolism, negotiated between the congregation and its chosen voices.

Drawing on archival sources, interviews with cantors, and photographs, Slobin traces the development of the...

Klezmer, the Yiddish word for a folk instrumental musician, has come to mean a person, a style, and a scene. This musical subculture came to the United States with the late-nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Although it had declined in popularity by the middle of the twentieth century, this lively music is now enjoying recognition among music fans of all stripes. Today, klezmer flourishes in the United States and abroad in the world music and accompany Jewish celebrations. The outstanding essays collected in this volume investigate American klezmer: its roots,...

This volume presents a cultural record of the Jewish folk music of Eastern Europe, through the eyes of ethnomusicologist, Moshe Beregovski. It includes contextual responses to Jewish folk music, essays on musical influences, and notes and lyrics of nearly 300 folk songs.

As a measure of individual and collective identity, music offers both striking metaphors and tangible data for understanding societies in transition--and nowhere is this clearer than in the recent case of the Eastern Bloc. "Retuning Culture" presents an extraordinary picture of this phenomenon. This pioneering set of studies traces the tumultuous and momentous shifts in the music cultures of Central and Eastern Europe from the first harbingers of change in the 1970s through the revolutionary period of 1989-90 to more recent developments.
During the period of state socialism, both the...

Here presented for the first time in English are Beregovski's surviving essays, plus his anthologies containing hundreds of folk songs with full Yiddish and English texts.