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TODAY'S KLEZMER SCENE, WHILE IT AFFIRMS A DEGREE OF musical continuity with the past, is in fact the result of an experience of rupture. Reviewing The Klezmorim's first album, East Side Wedding, in 1977, Nat Hentoff commented that "For years now, I had thought the klezmorim to be nearly extinct. Oh, some old players must still be boldly wailing in some dwindling Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, but surely they are the last of their line." When he heard them, he "would close his eyes and grin at the ghosts of my clan in Minsk and Pinsk." Now, he continued, a new generation has "taken up and merrily revivified this heritage."1 At the time, Hentoff heard the past. Years later, Lev Liberman, who co-founded The Klezmorim in 1975, would look back and see harbingers of the future: "I'd like to think that the current klezmer revival had its origins in our early experiments with tight ensemble playing, improvisation, klezmer/jazz fusions, neo-klezmer composition, street music, world beat, and New Vaudeville."2
In the hiatus between the old and the new players can be found keys to changes of sensibility that have made today's scene possible. Whatever their ostensible subject, the essays in this issue sound the sensibilities specific to the klezmer phenomenon of the last twenty-five years. They show "klezmer music" to be a powerful index of what Raymond Williams has called changing structures of feeling. Williams distinguishes feeling ("meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt") from ideology ("formally held and systematic beliefs"), noting that they are of course interrelated in practice: "Methodologically, then, a `structure of feeling' is a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such elements [affective elements of consciousness and relationships] and their connection in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence."3 The essays gathered here provide rich evidence of just such "affective elements of consciousness" and their historical location.
My essay explores the historical formation of the klezmer phenomenon in terms of changing structures of feeling. I begin by considering arguments over terminology-not only the term klezmer, but also the word revival-and how these debates situate klezmer music within a larger musical landscape. I then relate the klezmer phenomenon to what Haim Soloveitchik...