performed by Czernowitzer Civilkapelle.
key: D major
mode: D E F# G A B (C) C#
melody: T d r m f s l ta
form: dance, four sections ABCD
meter: duple
English function names: tonic dominant
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: T D7
Scale degrees: I V7
Chords: D A7A
D A7
|:/ / |/ /|/ / |/ / |
D A7 D
|/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / :|
B
A7
|:/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / |
A7 D
|/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / :|
C
A7 D A7 D A7
|:/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / |
A7 D A7 D
|/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / :|
D
D A7
|:/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / |
D A7 D
|/ / |/ / |/ / |/ / :|For those unfamiliar with klezmer, at its absolute basic it's Eastern European Jewish wedding music. Since Jewish weddings prior to WWI were often multi-week affairs with a variety of rituals, dancing, and partying, musicians (klezmorim) came up with many, many pieces of music that signaled and accompanied all of the parts of the festivities. While much of the repertoire is straight-up dance music, much of it served other functions. There are pieces to wake people up in the morning, pieces to move people through the streets of the village to the events, pieces to say the party's over for now go home, pieces for the ritual bath, pieces to make the bride mourn the end of her childhood, and pieces for every bit of the wedding ceremony itself, from seating the bride, to — as is the case in this piece — welcoming the mother-in-law (di shviger).1
Who is the mother-in-law that is celebrated in these songs? The groom's mom or the bride's mom? From what I can tell (Zev Feldman's monograph on klezmer, being my primary read, here), each guest might be welcomed with their own bespoke tune, so it could be either. But it seems that when people say "THE mother-in-law" they are referring to the mother of the groom, who may form a fraught relationship with the bride in the name of who indeed is the most important female in the groom's life (but hopefully not).
Each section of the dance employs a different harmonic rhythm for the two chords, the first and fourth being almost but not exactly alike. They all fall into patterns that we've seen before in a variety of styles and cultural sources. The first and fourth sections have a rhythm that I like to call "punctuation" — one little chord change to signal the end of a phrase. What we haven't talked so much about is the idea of a half-cadence (US)/imperfect cadence (UK) vs an authentic cadence (US)/perfect cadence (UK). When I was in music school, we learned to further micromanage authentic cadences into perfect authentic and imperfect authentic depending on the voicing of the chord — not confusing at all. The book I checked the British terminology with also suggests "half close" and "full close." Half and full are a bit better than perfect and authentic, which is just way too much social pressure for a sound to bear. But I digress.
The idea is that ending a phrase on the tonic sounds complete and final — like coming home, whereas ending a phrase on something other than the tonic sounds like we need to keep going in order to get home. In both the first and fourth sections, the first phrase of each ends with a half cadence. The second section also employs what I call punctuation, but here it's all dominant until the very end of the section when it changes to the tonic. The upward melodic line ending on re at the end of the first phrase is what gives it a sense of half cadence. Then the same melody happens in the second phrase with a tiny loop-de-loop to end on the tonic instead.
After the almost-stasis of the second section, the third section gets hopping with a dominant-tonic shuttle. The first phrase ends with what Philip Tagg calls a counterpoise kickback — the pace of the shuttle doubles at the end of the phrase. Usually, we see this in tonic-counterpoise shuttles so that the phrase ends with the tonic.2 Here, it's being used to create a half cadence at the end of the first phrase.
The big surprise here is in the fourth section with the lowered 7th scale degree in the melody — mixolydian scale over the tonic. Obviously a big no-no in the classical music world, but we are not only in that world. We're only partially in that world, a foot in and a foot out. So we run into a problem of nomenclature and theory, appropriation and hegemony, square pegs and round holes. Can we even talk about major and mixolydian? Yes, with lots of caveats. Feldman points these out in the appendix to his book: Now that almost all of us grow up with Western harmonic values and structures (this includes Afro-diasporic musics), even when harmonies are not made explicit, we interpret solo melodies with this lens; we can't help it. There wasn't a theory developed for the Ashkenazic liturgical music until the latter part of the 1800s and the impetus to do so was simply living in the Western world, where having a music theory was just something you do. Much of Jewish life was also in the Ottoman world and absorbed some of its practices and theory. Lastly, even with Western music, it's not just the set of pitches you use but how you use them — the melodic tropes that let you know this is Mozart, this is Brahms, this is Ellington, this is Beyoncé, this is klezmer. It's not a sin to talk about major and mixolydian here, but it's important to realize that others may conceptualize things differently, and that those conceptualizations may be more apt. For the sake of us outsiders, sometimes you need something familiar to hang on to in order to get to the new thing you are after.
Not, as it is misspelled in the track metadata (which seems to be a mish-mash of Polish and German spellings), Schweiger, which would be someone who is staying silent for whatever reason. Boy, would that be a different piece!
For examples, cf. this index.