Modes in Klezmer Music

This article investigates modal practice in Jewish instrumental music from Eastern Europe, now known as klezmer."Mode" in this context refers to the melodic behavior of a given repertoire, including idiomatic figures, melodic tendencies, properties of stability and instability, and modulation pathways.The question, then, is, how can we model all those features of modal behavior that klezmer musicians know intuitively from experience?Studies in music cognition have used statistical properties of musical corpora to model enculturation and perception.In the present article, we provide descriptive and statistical analyses of 249 tunes from a volume collected and compiled by the preeminent Ukrainian Jewish ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski (1892-1961).The analyses identify four basic modes following Beregovski 2015, Rubin 2020, and others.Modes and modulations were tagged in digital (kern) files; the digital files are available on a companion website (https://shanahdt.github.io/mode_in_klezmer/).Modulation pathways are presented with sample tunes and weighted network diagrams.Some of the modes and modulations map onto the major-minor key system of Western European repertoires while others are distinct; this variety underlines the intersectional nature of klezmer music.Pitch counts and melodic tendencies exhibit distinctive features of the modes, some of which correlate with intervallic properties.The histograms and melodic transition data are based on pitch rather than pitch class and thus do not assume octave equivalence.Overall, the article models a musical repertoire that blends elements from Western European music, Eastern and Southeastern European traditions, and the liturgical and folk traditions of Eastern European Jews.