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The Ethnic Clarinet The C4 standard

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Re: More on how to start :)

Author: Steve Epstein
Date: 2005-06-04 08:42

music_is_life wrote:

> wow, mr. literal. are we not talking jewish music? sure, the
> augmented 2nd could make it sound...turkish...I guess...but I
> wasn't really refering to anything else. Klezmer has a certain
> sound to it. If you throw the augmented second into that scale,
> it makes it sound jewish, no?
>
> sorry, I knew that d minor= main key was blanket...but I did
> not say there are no other keys. or that you should stop
> playing in other keys.

You can augment or diminish and you can play in any key you like. None of that makes anything sound Jewish, Greek, or ethnic of any kind. What makes something sound sound klezmer is your understanding of the style and skills in conveying it. For example, I can make the very old English folk tune Childgrove sound like an ancient Hebrew melody

Click here http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/FindTune.html, plug in Childgrove and hit "find" to see the tune. I do it by wailing and bending notes. But Childgrove is really one of those early music numbers with harmonies in open fifths. Other such tunes I can turn into jazz by just by making them sound that way, by wailing and bending differently. The gifted klezmer clarinettist Margo Leverett has a CD where she makes old-time Appalachian tunes sound klezmer, while old-time fiddlers can do the reverse with klezmer tunes. It has little to do with the key or the mode.

Steve Epstein

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