Der Gasn Nign, ca. 5 min

Composer: Traditional/arranged by David Krakauer
Instrumentation: clarinet and string quartet
Recording

Der Heyser Bulgar, ca. 3.5 min

Composer: Traditional/arranged by David Krakauer
Instrumentation: clarinet and string quartet

WEDDING DANCE, CA. 4 min

Composer: Traditional/arranged by David Krakauer
Instrumentation: clarinet and string quartet

PROGRAM NOTES:

Wedding Dance, Der Gasn Nign (The Street Song), and Der Heyser Bulgar (The Hot Bulgar) are three standards of the Eastern European Jewish klezmer repertoire. In creating my arrangements of these traditional celebration tunes for strings plus myself, I have basically drawn from the old 1920s klezmer recordings as my main source material. However I have also thrown in influences from the work I have done with musician colleagues for the past 15+ years. For example, in The Wedding Dance, I give the string players the option to erase or leave out parts ad libitum during the first pass of the melody, creating a kind of improvisation. In this way each performance turns out to be totally unique. And in Der Gasn Nign I have worked to recreate in the strings the haunting atmosphere of the electric guitar that I was able to find in the arrangements I came up with for my band.