Yiddish Music

The article is a collaboration of two research projects: first one is the new annotated edition of Moisei Beregovskii’s collection of Hassidic tunes (1946) in preparation by Yaakov Mazor in the framework of the Jewish Music Research Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The second project is a collaborative Israeli-Ukrainian project titled “The Hassidic Nign in Right Bank Ukraine and East Galicia: Between Autochthonous and External Soundscapes” lead by the three additional authors of the present article. The article is dedicated to the study of music in Ukrainian Hasidism, the main representative kind of which is nign – a religious song, performed mainly without words, by men, solo or collectively, in a monophonic texture, and fulfilling various religious functions of mystical background. Nign has apparently started to crystallize from the mid-eighteenth century onwards on the territories of Podillya and Volyn, with the consolidation of the Hassidic movement in those areas of Ukraine (then Poland and later on the Russian Empire).
Noticed by many scholars, the affinity that the Hassidic tunes have with the music of both Jewish and their co-territorial non-Jewish societies in Ukraine has led to the key question of this study, which is: What insights one can gain from the comparative analysis of melodies to the fuller picture of the Ukrainian Hassidic soundscape. The methodology of the study of the Hassidic nign in its historical, regional and conceptual Ukrainian contexts is based on comparative analysis of the nign (the nign itself attributed to the founder of the Chernobyl dynasty, Rabbi Mordechai of Chernobyl, its tune transcribed by M. Beregovskii from memory in 1920 and republished many times), its another version transcribed by Joseph Achron, and the four Ukrainian compositions from the anthology of Ukrainian folk melodies by Z. Lysko. The preliminary results of the comparative study of these musical texts in terms of form, modality, melodic contour, rhythm and performance practice, in this stage of the research show more differences than similarities between Hassidic and Ukrainian musical texts and contexts.

Keywords: Hassidic music, Moyshe Beregovski, nign, melodic contour, rhythmic patterns, form, Rabbi Mordechai of Chernobyl

https://doi.org/10.33398/2523-4846-2020-16-1-141-157

http://ethnomusic.com.ua/

The present bibliography adheres to the following definition of Eastern-Yiddish folk song (Lukin 2020): songs governed by a distinctive folklore aesthetics, rooted in the creative freedom of improvisation within a traditional canon; thus differing from either the products of the elite culture or from the media-driven popular repertoires.
These songs were primarily orally transmitted within the vast community of EasternYiddish speakers in Europe, and existed in multiple poetic and musical versions. This definition dictates the exclusion of musical works of literary, individual or professional origin, such as artistic compositions, arrangements of Yiddish material, Holocaust songs, Yiddish Theatre songs and other purely popular genres. Paraliturgical chants - zmires, nigunim - and their study are cited only if they include a significant Yiddish lingual component.

An abridged version of this bibliography appeared as part of: Feldman, W. Z., Lukin, M. “East European Jewish Folk Music,” In: Seidman, N. (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies. New York, 2017, 86 pp. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199840731-0155.

"The Ashkenazim of eastern Europe constituted the largest portion of the Jewish people in modern times, and their musical creativity shows far deeper internal connections and development than that of any other Jewish ethnos. The nature of what constituted orally transmitted Jewish folkloric genres differed fundamentally from the folklores of any of the co-territorial Gentile cultures. This bibliography excludes the most individual and professional genres—cantorial art (khazones/hazzanut) and Western artistic compositions or arrangements of Yiddish material, as well as purely popular genres. The four musical repertoires treated here are (i) Nusakh (nusah), as the basis of the dominant style of liturgical singing, in both its communal and semi-professional form as performed by the precentor baltfile (ba’al-tefilah); (ii) nign and zmires: religious and mystical vocal music, principally the nign (nigun) repertoires of Hasidic groups, whether without text, using Hebrew/Aramaic texts, or mixtures of languages as well as the paraliturgical songs sung on the Sabbath and other holidays, by both Hasidim and Misnagdim, known usually as zmires (zemirot); (iii) instrumental klezmer music for weddings and dancing; part of the bibliography this topic includes sections on the wedding orator (badkhn) and on the dance performed to klezmer melodies; and (iv) Yiddish folk song."