Fiddler Zoë Aqua researched Jewish music in the Transylvania area of Romania and found that much has been lost to time, to WWII and assimilation; her new klezmer compositions draw on the region’s folk sounds

By Jim Coleman for Ashland.news

Ashland concertgoers have a chance to encounter a rare musical treat. Klezmer violinist Zoë Aqua and her Transylvanian String Band will play a house concert of klezmer music Wednesday, Feb. 25, as part of the group’s 12-show tour of the Western United States.

Aqua is a Denver musician, a composer, educator and ethnomusicologist. She met her bandmates — folk musicians Kálmán Szopos, Károly Dénes and Gergely Réman — while she was studying music in Transylvania, a region of northwest Romania, on a Fulbright scholarship. With Aqua on the fiddle, Szopos plays the brácsa, a three-stringed viola; Réman plays the Hungarian cimbalom, a hammer dulcimer; and Dénes plays the double bass — “the instruments of a typical Transylvanian string band,” Aqua said.

Together, with Aqua as composer, they created a live album of tunes titled “In a Sea of Stars.” The album captures the band performing those tunes in two Romanian synagogues. The Ashland concert will bring some of that music to the Rogue Valley.

Aqua’s website describes a concert in one of those synagogues in which her band played “compositions inspired by the lost music of the Jewish people that populated the city before World War II, assimilation and emigration broke the chain of cultural transmission.”

Aqua said in an interview with a Boulder, Colorado, radio station that part of her research into Eastern European was a search for musical tradition that has passed down through the generations but that “in a lot of ways was a broken chain in klezmer music.”

Klezmer music is a centuries-old Jewish tradition with influences from other folk traditions. Klezmer musicians often played at weddings and religious celebrations. When World War II destroyed whole Jewish communities in Europe, the klezmer tradition was preserved in the United States.

A klezmer revival began in the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s. The Klezmatics, a New York band that formed in 1986, became a big influence on Aqua.

The current tour grew out of Aqua’s longtime love of klezmer music and her study of folk music in Hungary and Romania. Losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic played a role.

“I lost my teaching job” in New York, Aqua said, “and I was looking for something to do.”

Aqua got a Fulbright grant and, starting in 2021, she spent nearly two years living in Romania and studying the region’s folk music.

Her bio notes that Aqua traveled “rutted roads full of horse carts and tractors to meet homesteading musicians whose minor modes and slow slides had traces of the kind of Jewish music prevalent there before the war.”

In her research, Aqua said, she found some old Jewish repertoire in the northern part of Transylvania, near Ukraine. But overall, she didn’t encounter a lot of Jewish compositions.

She’s doing something about that. Having done the ethnomusicology fieldwork, seeing and hearing what’s out there, building trust with the Transylvanian musicians she met, Aqua has put what she’s learned into new songs.

“I’m approaching the lack of Jewish repertoire and composing new music that blends klezmer and other traditional folk music of the area,” she said.

Her bandmates are part of a current Transylvanian folk revival as well. During Aqua’s time in Transylvania, she started playing with them regularly.

Performing with a string band takes Aqua back to the traditions of early 20th-century klezmer music, before clarinets and horns became popular additions to American klezmer bands in the 1920s and ’30s, she said.

After the current tour, which includes a show Feb. 24 in Eugene at the University of Oregon’s  Aasen-Hull Hall, the musicians plan to record a studio album, Aqua said.

For those not familiar with klezmer music, it might help to think of Aqua’s group as a string band.

“I’m trying to reach out to people who like bluegrass music or Irish music and other kinds of fiddle music,” she said. “I hope people will give it a try.”

Seattle-area fiddler Devon Léger, writing for Songlines magazine, gave “In a Sea of Stars” a five-star review, praising Aqua as “a spectacular, mesmerizing fiddler” who “takes her skill forward by bringing her original compositions into the lost world of Jewish fiddlers in Transylvania.” Léger wrote that he was “moved to tears over her reclamation not only of a tradition lost following World War II and decades of assimilation, but of the land itself.”

Tickets to see Zoë Aqua and her Transylvanian String Band in Ashland are available here. The show is at 7 p.m. Feb. 25, and tickets are limited. For more information about Aqua, or to hear some of her music, go to zoeaqua.com.

Jim Coleman is a retired journalist who volunteers with Ashland.news. Email Ashland.news at [email protected].