8. Intercultural Musicking

Abstract

The term klezmer, from the Hebrew klei zemer (vessel of song), originally referred to a musician rather than to a music culture. Such musicians (plural form, klezmorim) were essential in the largely dance-based music culture of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. We have taught klezmer ensemble performance over the last decade in a UK university music department. The klezmer ensemble (founded in 2011) is linked to an assessed module in ensemble performance taken by music undergraduates in a department which has ‘Western’ music theory and practice at its core despite becoming more diverse in recent years. The ensemble provides opportunities for performance both within the university and the local community. It functions as a space for intercultural ‘musicking’, enabling students to not only become familiar with a Musical Other but also develop a sense of situated performance. The aspiration is for the teaching and learning to be critically underpinned, alert to the need for appropriacy and the avoidance of appropriation. Accordingly, the students learn to perform klezmer in a culturally-, historically-. and functionally-informed way with a keen eye also on the situatedness of their contemporary performances. As informed by the work of Schön (himself a musician who illustrated his reflective processes with reference to musicians), as extended by Farrell, the chapter explores the processes and roles of various types of, and moments for, reflection in students' experience of klezmer performance, and it considers how such reflective practices contribute to the students' developing performative confidence and purposefulness vis-a-vis situated performance.