Schabbes, Schabbes - Yiddish Songs for two Treble Recorders (Playing Score)

Schabbes, Schabbes - Yiddish Songs for two Treble Recorders (Playing Score)

Yiddish music is the music of the former Jewish population of eastern Europe, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Rumania and the Ukraine.  The repertoire of the klezmorim - as Yiddish musicians were known - extends from traditional songs (some of them liturgical in purpose) to dances rooted primarily in the music of the non-Jewish Rumanian peasantry.

Originally the Yiddish kapelyes were small formations.  Around the turn of the century they grew to twelve members: strings, wooden transverse flute, clarinet, brass instruments, bass drum with cymbals, and snare drum.  Beginning in the 1920s the strings gradually gave way to the clarinet and the brass instruments.

Our volume includes fourteen highly contrasting pieces arranged for two treble recorders and suitable in difficulty even for advanced beginners. The songs depict Yiddish life in all its pageantry. Some are religious in essence while others are work songs, love songs, or songs of nostalgia.

With their slightly melancholy air, masking a disdainful laugh at life's adversities, the pieces in our volume provide a useful introduction to the central area of Yiddish culture.