cellio | Shabbat (music and freedom)

Friday night I met Malcolm Dalglish. Neat! (His neice was being bat mitzvah this Shabbat at my synagogue.) Malcolm Dalglish is a very good hammer-dulcimer player, one of several whose recordings I listened to a lot when I was starting to play. I've never seen him in concert and had completely lost track of him, and then my rabbi happened to mention his name in passing at services and my ears perked up. So I tried not to be a fangirl. :-)

Speaking of music, what is the shared musical property that many Yiddish songs have? This is probably really "many songs from such-and-such time and location", but I don't know the genre. But there's something -- a mode, a melobdic pattern, a chord structure, or something -- that allowed me to correctly predict that the song the cantor was about to sing would be in Yiddish, based only on the piano intro. And the song really did sound like the Yiddish songs Dani's mother likes to listen to (those are probably mostly from Russia), though it was not one I recognized. I just lack the sample size to put my finger on what that similarity is. (I don't actually like a lot of this music, so my curiosity will not be satisfied by accumulating a large sample size. :-) )

Saturday morning's ice-breaker question was interesting (though we were trying to keep answers short due to time). Every morning we thank God for making us free. (Orthodox Jews thank God for making us not slaves, instead.) So, looking ahead to 2004, are we more looking forward to "freedom to" or "freedom from" something? (Naming the something was optional.)

I live a pretty privileged life. I have plenty to eat and wear; I have a good job; I have a comfortable home; I have good friends and family; there is nothing that I truly need but lack. So my thoughts turned immediately to "freedom to". Nothing specific came to mind, actually -- I hope to pretty much keep doing the things I've been doing. I have no major changes queued up.

There is one area of concern, though; I hope for freedom from the big-brother government that things like the Patriot act enable. (Were you paying attention? Did you notice that many provisions of Patriot II are now law, and that the FBI can now secretly snoop on you through your bank, credit-card company, stock broker, and even jeweler? What's next, monitoring grocery purchases?) I think our civil liberties are probably at their greatest risk since the McCarthy era. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to say something yesterday; it might have gotten a few more people thinking about it.

Shabbat (music and freedom)

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