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An intercultural dialogue: Yiddish & Roma music, culture & identity
Introduction by Dr. Alan Bern [Deutsche Übersetzung] | [polish translation] The Project "The Other Europeans" is a collaborative project of other music e.V. (Germany), the KlezMORE Festival Vienna (Austria), and the Jewish Culture Festival of Krakow (Poland). In 2008-09, all three festivals will present activities that explore the historical and contemporary relationships between Ashkenazic Jewish (Yiddish) and Roma cultures. The core activity is to create and present two new bands, one Yiddish and one Roma, made up of outstanding Yiddish and Roma musicians based in Europe. In 2008, each band will develop and perform separate repertoires with common Romanian roots, and in 2009 the two bands will collaborate to create a crossover repertoire and style. Complementing this process, the festivals will also present symposia, workshops on instrumental music, vocal music, dance and language, and a film series, all focused on an intercultural understanding of Yiddish and Roma cultures. (For a list of activities at each festival, please see each individual festival website.) |
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Krakow ● Vienna ● Weimar ● |
Background For many centuries, Jews and Roma have occupied important but ambivalent economic, political, and cultural roles within European societies. Subordinate to and always only provisionally accepted by the dominant cultures among which they lived, both Jews and Roma developed complex cultural identities; maintaining their own traditions while at the same time constantly adapting to and interacting with those of their neighbours. For that reason, Jews and Roma represent "transcultural" European identities, in both fact and imagination. The goal of the project partners is to promote intercultural exchange between performers of Roma and Yiddish music, both for the enrichment of the musicians and their respective cultures, and as a contribution to the ongoing broad discussion of European identity and culture. Research Focus of the Project Although both "transcultural," there are profound differences between Jewish and Roma cultures, anchored in their separate histories and traditions, and in the political economies, histories and cultures of the different societies with which they interacted. All the more interesting, therefore, are the similarities in the roles played by professional musicians in both cultures, particularly in places where they lived side-by-side. In pre-war Romania and parts of the Ukraine, for example, Ashkenazic (Yiddish-speaking) Jews and Roma were the professional musicians who played a mixed repertoire at both their own social events and those of their co-territorial neighbors. In that respect they represented a successful intercultural exchange across linguistic, political and cultural borders. Following the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, it was often Roma musicians, who had played in pre-war Jewish ensembles, who preserved and transmitted a Yiddish music repertoire that would otherwise have been lost. Precisely the complex interculturality of Roma and Jewish cultures provoked nationalist chauvinist ideologies in the past to condemn them as “rootless,” “parasitic,” “degenerate,” and worse. Such attitudes are by no means relics of the past; they are visible throughout Europe today in recurring anti-Semitic and anti-Roma outbursts. In contrast, the same transcultural character of Yiddish and Roma music is romanticized and embraced by contemporary “world music” pop culture, which frames it as subversive and transgressive and therefore “hip.” Currently there is a popular wave of Roma and pseudo-Roma music and a similar wave of post-klezmer-inspired New Jewish Music. There are both imaginary affinities between them as well as genuine historical and musical contact. But contemporary encounters between Roma and Yiddish musicians tend to be promoted by commercial music industry interests to the neglect of other creative or historically-informed impulses that have little support or access to a public. In Romanian director Mihaileanu’s 1998 film “Train of Life” there is a scene in which a group of Jews and a group of Roma, both fleeing from the Nazis, encounter each other and discover their deep spiritual connection through an orgy of musical one-upsmanship. The real counterpart to that romanticized scene would be a genuine encounter between contemporary living Yiddish and Roma musicians, for the purpose of exploring similarities and differences in older repertoires and creating new musical syntheses with connections to their own real histories. The project will provide a framework for such an encounter and for differentiating between real and fictional representations of Jews and Roma. It will be driven by a spirit of inquiry and the desire to come to terms creatively with the transcultural inheritances of Yiddish and Roma music. |
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