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The festival has begun! Some of you wrote to ask me to post the selections of music from the lecture yesterday. Here they are.

Sholem Eliechem (1859 - 1916) the great 19^th Century Yiddish storyteller (and whose stories “Fiddler on the Roof” is based on) describes a master klezmer in his novella “Stepenyu.” He would grab his fiddle, give it a swipe with his bow – just one, no more – and already it would begin to speak. But how, do you think, it spoke? With real words, with a tongue, like a living person…speaking, arguing, singing with a sob, in the Jewish manner, with a shriek, with a cry from deep within the heart, from the soul…Different voices poured out all kinds of songs, all so lonely, so melancholy, that they would seize your heart and tear out your soul, sap you of your health…Hearts would become full, overflowed, eyes would fill with tears. People would sigh, moan, weep.

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A tactile music of surfaces, journeying from the dry rock of the desert, to the pre-war Lower East Side reeking of sweat and garlic, to the very dome of heaven itself.  

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