"Lodz" - Les Yeux Noirs (for Wednesday)

It’s another piece from my favority group at the moment, Les Yeux Noirs (The Black Eyes). Just to recap, Les Yeux Noirs is a Paris-based octet who creates their own unique sound, blending Manouche (French gypsy music) with Klezmer (Yiddish folk music). Their band name comes from a Russian Gypsy tune popularized in the 1930s by Belgian-born jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, an artist who is one of the band’s major musical influences. The album title, “Balamouk,” is Romanian for "house of the insane."

This song is called “Lodz.” A google search led me to a website on the Lodz ghetto in Poland, one of the more infamous Jewish ghetto during WWII. Lodz was a city in central Poland that held the second largest Jewish community in Europe, after Warsaw. About 230,000 Jews in Lodz suffered in the first large-scale ghetto organized by the Nazis. Eventually 25,000 more Jews and gypsies were transported to the Lodz ghetto. The band’s roots in Yiddish / gypsy music and this search are so close that the song would have to have been written with the ghetto in mind.

Before conducting this search, I had no idea that the song had anything to do with the Holocaust. However, I thought that the music exuded a sort of Schindler’s List-type feeling, with dramatic, virtuosic violins reminiscent of the film’s soundtrack. The song appropriately remains in the minor mode, and the melancholic nature of the violin is used to full effect in this piece.

The song begins with a violin duet between the two Slabiak brothers, Erik and Olivier. A double bass and accordion accompany a violin solo. The song is designed like a polka, with the bass playing on the first and third beats. The first section is most likely a phrase group: There are two parallel symmetric phrases, each ending on half cadences. This is followed by two contrasting symmetric phrases, with no obvious cadences. Another two contrasting symmetric phrases are played, with the last ending in a PAC. The end of this section is the first time that I heard tonic. This suggests the never-ending turmoil of those in the Lodz ghetto. They were thrown out of their homes, thrown into the cramped ghetto, and could not find their place under Nazi rule.

This section is repeated as a duet between the two violins, playing mostly in thirds. I’m starting to think that this harmonization is characteristic of Yiddish or gypsy music. One of the violins is heard improvising over the the main expository theme. Their playing becomes more dramatic and emotional - I want to use the term messa di voce, but I've only seen this term in connection with singing. It suggests that the performer crescendo and decrescendo through the held notes, and that's exactly what I hear going on. It's like the violins "bloom" in volume and in color.

The theme is repeated a third time, with additional strumming on the acoustic guitar. One violin plays alone. Only the accordion plays the final phrase.