Introduction

This website provides machine-readable music files, searchable metadata, mode analyses, and mode data for a corpus of klezmer tunes from the volume Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, compiled by the pre-eminent Ukrainian Jewish ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski (1892-1961). The volume was published posthumously, first in Russian (1987) and then in English (2001 and 2015). A hand-written manuscript of the volume is also available in Beregovski 2013. The tunes were collected from a variety of sources in Ukraine, in the decades before World War II, and the volume represents one of the most important sources for Jewish instrumental music from Eastern Europe, now known as klezmer (Slobin 1986, 253; Feldman 2016, 128).

The website is intended as a self-standing resource for musicians and scholars and as a supplement to an article by Malin and Shanahan, currently in progress.

At present, this collection has 245 out of the 254 tunes in Beregovski’s volume, and sections from four additional tunes. It leaves out tunes and sections without a time signature or with variable meter (i.e., with varying time signatures and frequent fermatas). There are five pieces without a regular meter: the Dobranoch no. 9, Kale-bazetsns nos. 13 and 14, and the Ava rabos nos. 17 and 18. There are also four pieces that begin without a regular meter and have metric sections at the end: the Khtsos no. 19, the Taksim no. 20, and the Doinas nos. 21 and 22. The metric sections at the ends of these are included in the corpus.

The corpus was digitized from the second English edition by Research Assistants Rebecca Hamel and Izzy Fincher with funding from the Center for Humanities & the Arts and Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Research Assistant Laine Gruver assisted with data entry for the website.

Metadata

This website enables searches based on Beregovski’s metadata, provides corpus-level data on mode, and a resource for further computational analysis. It is not a replacement for the full volume and does not include key features: editor’s notes by Slobin and Rothstein (from the first edition) and Bjorling (for the second), an introductory essay by Beregovski, remarks on the transcriptions by Beregovski, a music editor’s Note by Kurt Bjorling, an addendum by Izaly Zemtsovsky, and more. The music notation is also incomplete in some regards; see further notes below. The second edition is available from Kurt Bjorling at https://muziker.org/. The Russian edition is in the public domain and available from https://yiddish-culture.com/ru/yiddish_ru/beregovsky-works_ru/.

There are two kinds of metadata on this site:

  1. Metadata from Beregovski’s notes, which includes genre, source (i.e., the musician who performed, recorded, or notated the music), source type (recording, transcription, or manuscript), the source instrument or voice, the location where the item was collected, main region, subregion, the date it was collected, and the original location for instances where the musician reported learning the tune from somewhere else.
  2. Malin’s analysis of mode in the volume. This includes a modal designation for each tune as a whole, an indication of whether there are changes of mode, secondary modes (as applicable), the measures for secondary modes (as applicable), and additional notes for instances of ambiguity.

This information is available in two searchable spreadsheets: (1) a spreadsheet with Beregovki’s metadata and (2) a spreadsheet with Malin’s analysis. The tune numbers in both spreadsheets link to scores with annotations, rendered in Verovio.

Beregovski notated all of the tunes in the volume in G for ease of comparison. Thus pitch data on this website correlates with scale-degree data. Passages that modulate to modes with other tonics are tagged and analyzed separately.

Beregovski also notated the tunes with G4 as the main tonic and our pitch data is differentiated by register. (It is based on pitch, not pitch-class.) Thus, G4 in the data represents the main tonic, D5 represents scale-degree ^5 in the main 8ve and D4 represents scale-degree ^5 in the octave below.

Analysis

Malin’s analysis relies on a basic classification of four modes in klezmer music. The names given here are freygish, raised fourth, minor, and major. These same modes are sometimes known by other names, which reference Jewish prayer modes or the Church mode: freygish = ahavah rabbah; raised fourth = altered Dorian or misheberakh; minor = magen avot; major = adonai malakh. Furthermore, while there are elements of Western European tonality, the “major” and “minor” modes in klezmer should not be taken as equivalent to major and minor keys in the European tradition. An introduction to the modes is provided in the article by Malin and Shanahan. Additional sources can be found in Beregovski 2015; Slobin 1980; Sokolow 1987; Horowitz 1993; Netsky 2015; Feldman 2016; and Rubin 2020. (See full citations in the references section.)

For the purposes of this study, Malin tagged mode changes that align with phrases of four bars or longer (see, for instance, the Dobranoch no. 11). Malin also tagged mode changes that occur at cadences leading into new sections (see, for instance, section B from the Freylekhs no. 87). Malin chose not to tag other brief modal shifts, less than a phrase or four measures long. Thus, musical passages used to extract the pitch profile for G minor include brief moments of C minor, Bb major, C freygish, and other modes, which we feel is appropriate. The data for individual modes shows subtle ways in which they interact with each other; the modes are not treated as hermetic entities. The mode analysis page shows Malin’s parsing for all the tunes in the corpus with further notes.

Malin’s mode analysis answers three basic questions: What is the pitch profile of each mode? What are characteristic melodic tendencies of each mode? And what are characteristic modulation pathways? These questions can be explored with the data in this website; they are addressed directly in the article by Malin and Shanahan. The article and this website may also serve as the basis for comparison with adjacent repertoires from both Jewish and non-Jewish traditions.

We thank Alicia Svigals and Joshua Horowitz for their input on the analysis of selected tunes and the anonymous reviewers of our manuscript for input on the methodology.

Additional Details

There are a few additional details that users of the corpus should take note of:

  1. The corpus does not include local variants within tunes–i.e., places where Beregovski notated an additional option for a few measures. It also does not include the tune variants that come one right after the other in the volume. For instance, the corpus includes the Freylekhs no. 132, but not the variant 132a. The study of tune variants is an important topic in klezmer music, but it is not one that we deal with directly here.
  2. The digital files do not use modal key signatures because of Humdrum limitations. Tunes in G freygish, for instance, use a three-flat key signature with B-natural accidentals.
  3. The files are missing tempo markings at present. We expect to add them soon.

Here, readers can also find the corpus downloadable as kern files, as well as analyses conducted with the Humdrum Toolkit, and scores visualized with the Verovio Humdrum Viewer. These analyses include frequency distributions, and n-gram analyses.

References

Beregovski, Moshe. 2001. Jewish Instrumental Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski. Edited by Mark Slobin, Robert A. Rothstein, and Michael Alpert. Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press.

———. 2013. Jewish Musical Folklore. 5 volumes, 5 CD Set. Kiev: Dukh i Litera.

———. 2015. Jewish Instrumental Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski. Edited by Mark Slobin, Michael Alpert, and Robert Rothstein. Second edition, Revised by Kurt Björling. Draft 3.4.

Beregovskiĭ, Moisei. 1987. Еврейская народная инструментальная музыка (Evreiskaia narodnaia instrumental’naia muzyka). Edited by Goldin. Moscow: Советский композитор.

Feldman, Walter Zev. 2016. Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Horowitz, Joshua. 1993. “The Klezmer Freygish Shteyger: Mode, Sub-Mode and Modal Progression.” Unpublished manuscript.http://www.budowitz.com/Budowitz/Essays.html.

Netsky, Hankus. 2015. Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Jewish Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Rubin, Joel E. 2020. New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century: The Music of Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.

Slobin, Mark. 1980. “The Evolution of a Musical Symbol in Yiddish Culure.” In Studies in Jewish Folklore: Proceedings of a Regional Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies Held at the Spertus College of Judaica, Chicago, 313–30. Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies.

———. 1986. “A Fresh Look at Beregovski’s Folk Music Research.” Ethnomusicology 30 (2): 253–60.

Sokolow, Pete. 1987. “A Few Notes and Observations on the Theory and Performance of Klezmer Music.” In The Compleat Klezmer, 19–28. Cedarhurst, N.Y.: Tara Publications.