Shmeltzer / Neginah Hora

This video features Lipa Shmeltzer, a star on the chassidic music scene known for a variety of music styles that includes rap and techno among others, doing more or less the 'Standard Second Dance' - (second music set at a Jewish wedding, usually reserved for those who have not died out after the first dance.) This video is quite representative of the tempo of Jewish wedding music. It's fast. Sport photographers, who are pro at capturing fast action, would probably have a hard time shooting at these speeds. This video is from an orthodox Jewish wedding, hence the separate dancing for men and women.

This is another video with Lipa. This one is from a wedding in London. In this clip Lipa is performing his own stuff and it looks more like a concert than a wedding.

Shostakovich and Jewish Wedding Music

One thing Shostakovich was not was Jewish, by birth or belief. Yet from the frenzied klezmer dance melody of the Second Piano Trio (1944) to the mournful vocal cycle From the Jewish Folk Poetry (1948) to the sweeping sorrow of the Holocaust evoked in the Thirteenth Symphony ("Babi Yar") of 1962, Shostakovich carried on a lifelong affair with the sound and soul of Russian Jewry. Why would a non-Jewish composer living in one of the modern world's most bitterly anti-Semitic and repressive societies, where mere possession of Hebrew literature could lead to arrest and imprisonment, choose to make Jewishness a recurrent theme in his work? The answer is tied up with the debate over the man behind the music.

Shostakovich was a Communist Party member and First Secretary of the Soviet Composers' Union, and his signature appeared on a 1973 letter attacking the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. Few doubted his tremendous musical talents, but there was little interest in the West for a composer who seemed such an obedient musical apparatchik.

Then came Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovitch as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, purportedly dictated shortly before the composer's death in 1975. Volkov, a senior editor at Sovetskaya Muzyka, the leading Soviet music journal, brought the manuscript to the United States in 1976 and published in English in 1979. Testimony offered a startling image of the quiet, legendarily taciturn composer as a secret freedom fighter, an anti-Soviet liberal who revealed himself only in these private conversations. Volkov's Shostakovich was boldly courageous and pettily proud, alternately explaining the hidden anti-Soviet political meaning in many of his famous compositions and dismissing former colleagues such as Prokofiev in unflattering, gossipy terms.

The book's convoluted title was the first indication that this was not a standard autobiography. In fact, charges of forgery immediately began to surface among Soviet authorities and Western scholars. Volkov offered as evidence of Shostakovich's approval the composer's signature on the first page of each chapter, certifying that he had read the contents. And in the context of the Cold War and the political movement on behalf of Soviet Jewry, Westerners eagerly embraced the new heroic image of Shostakovich as a secret dissident, making his music a new concert hall favorite and Volkov's book a bestseller.

Shostakovich with Ivan Sollertinsky

Among the themes to emerge from Testimony was the central place of Jews and Jewishness in Shostakovich's life and creative work. Many of the people closest to Shostakovich were Jews, including his favorite pupil, Venyamin Fleishman, and his best friend, Ivan Sollertinsky. Both men died tragically during World War II, Fleishman as a Red Army soldier and Sollertinsky of illness exacerbated by wartime living conditions. Shostakovich produced musical tributes to each. He completed Fleishman's unfinished opera, Rothschild's Violin (1944), based on a Chekhov short story about a Jewish klezmer musician. Sollertinsky he recalled in the mournful, piercing Second Piano Trio, written as word of the Holocaust was reaching Moscow. The final section of this piece includes a freylekhs, a Jewish wedding tune that seems to link the dead and the living in a desperate, sacred dance of joy and sadness.

These are among a dozen major works in which Shostakovich displayed an intense, sustained interest in the larger symbolic meaning of Jewishness and Jewish music. What was the source of this attraction? Testimony provided one answer:

Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it's multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It's almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be... Jews became a symbol for me. All of man's defenselessness was concentrated in them. After the war, I tried to convey that feeling in my music. It was a bad time for Jews then. In fact, it's always a bad time for them.

Solomon Volkov with Shostakovich

...A substantial portion of his Jewish audience, in Russia and beyond, also continues to claim Shostakovich's music. Vladimir Zak calls Shostakovich's musical language a form of Jewish "biblical romanticism." Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the late exponent of American Jewish religious music, spoke of Shostakovich's music as soaked through with "the sorrow of the Jews...crying out together with the Torah." And so Volkov's work, while it may not successfully prove that Shostakovich was a political dissident, does rightly remind us that the great master of modern Russian music was also a great Jewish composer.

James Loeffler is a musicologist and writer based in New York City.
From Nextbook.org

Evolution of Hava Nagilah

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November 27, 2007

The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start

By NATALIE ANGIER

If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.”

I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.

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Many people don't know this, but the orthodox wedding dance music has also evolved and songs like Hava Nagilah are never played and are mainly associated with 'Neolithic', i.e. old country, traditional Judaism. Orthodox Jews have their own contemporary musicians whose music they prefer to the things their grandparents were listening to.
The Hora, however, is a dance that is danced at all Jewish weddings, albeit in a more modern, rhythmic kind of form.