Gesture, Dance and Melody in Traditional Ashkenazi Culture

The Fifteenth World Congress Of Jewish Studies Jerusalem

Session: Ashkenazi traditions: the Synagogue and Beyond, 3.8.09
Chair: Amalia Kedem

Summary:

Traditional Ashkenazic dance, as it had been practiced in Eastern Europe, featured a confluence of two diverse movement traditions – a western European, Germanic tradition based on set figures, and a Jewish tradition based on expressive gesture. This paper contends that the nature of the expressive dance movement can be correlated to a number of musical parameters involving melodic density, rhythmic structure, musical development and tempo.