Zorn's "Kristallnacht"
Apr. 12th, 2010 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretToday is the 27th of Nisan, the day Israel marks Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day.
As I've mentioned here before, I try to listen to John Zorn's "Kristallnacht" suite once a year, a tradition that dates back now to the spring of 2004 for me. It's a fearsome composition, a forty minute long musical essay on the Holocaust, and I could not handle listening to it any more frequently than annually. Zorn recognizes this, warning in the album's liner notes that repeated listening is not advised. In fact, this is a feature of the music. The "Never Again" movement contains high-pitched whines and squeals that, according to Zorn, may cause hearing loss after too prolonged an exposure. The movement is over 11 minutes long.
It's as if Zorn is going out of his way to keep you from listening to his album. It's an act not merely of emotional masochism but physical masochism to endure "Kristallnacht". And yet in doing a google search on the album, I found posts by other people who share my tradition. Why do I find the experience valuable enough to listen to it every year?
It's really hard to say. I suppose the best answer is to say that every time I return to the suite, I find more there. I find new depths of horror and I find new sources of strength and dignity. Last year's post on "Kristallnacht" focused on the way Zorn uses Klezmer in his composition, drawing inspired performances from trumpeter Frank London, clarinetist David Krakauer, and violinist Mark Feldman.
This year, the Klezmer felt a little obvious. Everybody uses Klezmer figures to suggest Judaism. When the Simpsons went to Israel, snippets from "Hava Nagila" cued you in that their plane landed, and a piece of "Heveinu Shalom Aleichem" ushers them out of the country. Yes, the Klezmer compositions here are way more inspired than that, and yes they're incredibly expressive and form a brilliant narrative arc through the 40 minutes, but... of course Zorn had to use Klezmer. Duh.
What really caught me this time around was the chazzanus, traditional Ashkenazi prayer chant. It's a lost art these days in America, drowned out by Shlomo Carlebach and others. If you want to listen to great Jewish cantorial music you probably have to go digging through sixty year old LPs, unless you're lucky enough to live near one of the handful of shuls that still boast a high quality chazzan. In the shuls I go to, any time an alter cocker tries to incorporate a little chazzanus in his prayers, people roll their eyes and eye their watches. But when it's well done, it can uplift your prayer to an incredible level. (The Jewish music sampler I threw up last week features Golijov's rich reinvention of the chazzanus tradition on "K'vakarat")
Zorn uses it here brilliantly. He doesn't lead with it. The opening section is all Klezmer and electronica, sounds that are familiar and instantly conjure up an image of the shtetl. The second section is the aforementioned "Never Again", with its high pitched sonic torture and its continuous, brutally unsubtle broken glass recordings. And here he begins to throw in recordings of chazzanus. Completely piercing prayers, the sounds of a person throwing "all their heart and all their soul" into worship of the divine. It's a simplification to say that Klezmer is Ashkenazi secular music and chazzanus Ashkenazi sacred music, but that dynamic suggests a related one. Klezmer as the sort of protective armor of modernization, concealing that which makes us essentially Jewish in order to let us live among the goyim. And then after Kristallnacht shatters that, the music of the heart comes out because it's all that we have left.
And yet of course Klezmer's secularity is a Jewish secularity. When you play Klezmer it's not like you can hide away your Judaism. So I think we have here an embrace of two Judaisms that were both dealt body blows during the Holocaust, and which both experienced cautious recovery and gradually a fuller blooming after the War. In past years, my read on "Gariin (Nucleus- the New Settlement)" has been fully a Zionist reading, that Zorn is tracing out the foundation of Israel, its dubious dreams and its false starts and its tragedies and eventually its triumphs and explosions of vigor and life. But this Two Judaisms concept accommodates American Judaism into its Post-War reinvention of the Jewish soul. Now we can have Klezmer without Chazzanus, Chazzanus without Klezmer, Chazzanus fused with Klezmer, and most excitingly, Chazzanus and Klezmer merging with new sounds altogether, drumbeats and saxophone runs that have no place in the prior history of Jewish music.
This music hurts so much to listen to, but it gives back so much, too. I'll see you next year, "Kristallnacht."
As I've mentioned here before, I try to listen to John Zorn's "Kristallnacht" suite once a year, a tradition that dates back now to the spring of 2004 for me. It's a fearsome composition, a forty minute long musical essay on the Holocaust, and I could not handle listening to it any more frequently than annually. Zorn recognizes this, warning in the album's liner notes that repeated listening is not advised. In fact, this is a feature of the music. The "Never Again" movement contains high-pitched whines and squeals that, according to Zorn, may cause hearing loss after too prolonged an exposure. The movement is over 11 minutes long.
It's as if Zorn is going out of his way to keep you from listening to his album. It's an act not merely of emotional masochism but physical masochism to endure "Kristallnacht". And yet in doing a google search on the album, I found posts by other people who share my tradition. Why do I find the experience valuable enough to listen to it every year?
It's really hard to say. I suppose the best answer is to say that every time I return to the suite, I find more there. I find new depths of horror and I find new sources of strength and dignity. Last year's post on "Kristallnacht" focused on the way Zorn uses Klezmer in his composition, drawing inspired performances from trumpeter Frank London, clarinetist David Krakauer, and violinist Mark Feldman.
This year, the Klezmer felt a little obvious. Everybody uses Klezmer figures to suggest Judaism. When the Simpsons went to Israel, snippets from "Hava Nagila" cued you in that their plane landed, and a piece of "Heveinu Shalom Aleichem" ushers them out of the country. Yes, the Klezmer compositions here are way more inspired than that, and yes they're incredibly expressive and form a brilliant narrative arc through the 40 minutes, but... of course Zorn had to use Klezmer. Duh.
What really caught me this time around was the chazzanus, traditional Ashkenazi prayer chant. It's a lost art these days in America, drowned out by Shlomo Carlebach and others. If you want to listen to great Jewish cantorial music you probably have to go digging through sixty year old LPs, unless you're lucky enough to live near one of the handful of shuls that still boast a high quality chazzan. In the shuls I go to, any time an alter cocker tries to incorporate a little chazzanus in his prayers, people roll their eyes and eye their watches. But when it's well done, it can uplift your prayer to an incredible level. (The Jewish music sampler I threw up last week features Golijov's rich reinvention of the chazzanus tradition on "K'vakarat")
Zorn uses it here brilliantly. He doesn't lead with it. The opening section is all Klezmer and electronica, sounds that are familiar and instantly conjure up an image of the shtetl. The second section is the aforementioned "Never Again", with its high pitched sonic torture and its continuous, brutally unsubtle broken glass recordings. And here he begins to throw in recordings of chazzanus. Completely piercing prayers, the sounds of a person throwing "all their heart and all their soul" into worship of the divine. It's a simplification to say that Klezmer is Ashkenazi secular music and chazzanus Ashkenazi sacred music, but that dynamic suggests a related one. Klezmer as the sort of protective armor of modernization, concealing that which makes us essentially Jewish in order to let us live among the goyim. And then after Kristallnacht shatters that, the music of the heart comes out because it's all that we have left.
And yet of course Klezmer's secularity is a Jewish secularity. When you play Klezmer it's not like you can hide away your Judaism. So I think we have here an embrace of two Judaisms that were both dealt body blows during the Holocaust, and which both experienced cautious recovery and gradually a fuller blooming after the War. In past years, my read on "Gariin (Nucleus- the New Settlement)" has been fully a Zionist reading, that Zorn is tracing out the foundation of Israel, its dubious dreams and its false starts and its tragedies and eventually its triumphs and explosions of vigor and life. But this Two Judaisms concept accommodates American Judaism into its Post-War reinvention of the Jewish soul. Now we can have Klezmer without Chazzanus, Chazzanus without Klezmer, Chazzanus fused with Klezmer, and most excitingly, Chazzanus and Klezmer merging with new sounds altogether, drumbeats and saxophone runs that have no place in the prior history of Jewish music.
This music hurts so much to listen to, but it gives back so much, too. I'll see you next year, "Kristallnacht."