Performed by Orkestar Kriminal.
key: D freygish
mode: D Eb F# G A Bb C
melody: L T R m f si l t d r
form: strophic
meter: duple
English function names: tonic subtonic
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: T ???
Scale degrees: I vii
Chords: C Bbm D
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D
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Cm
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Cm D
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Cm
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Cm D
|/ / / / |/ / / / |With freygish, our Western European music theory starts to fall apart, or at least tear at the seams. We have a very clear tonic-counterpoinse/home-not home harmonic set up — thank you, Philip Tagg, and the scale degree Roman numerals hold up just fine, but Riemannian theory doesn't handle it so well. And never mind Heinrich Schenker who is probably more famous for being a self-hating Jew than for his ideas on music theory, which is too bad, but I digress. C-minor isn't the relative minor or dominant of anything else in the mode, which is how Riemannian theory rolls — we wouldn't say it's the minor subdominant of the subdominant, s/S. It's "Leittonwechselmässig", because there is a half-step motion to the tonic — that beautiful Eb — but that Eb comes from the third of the triad and not the root or the fifth. Maybe someone better versed in Riemannian and/or Neo-Riemannian theory than I can come up with a succinct term for this chord function — just out of curiosity. A large part of the reason that freygish does not fit neatly into European theories is that the theories are developed from the major/minor set. Where does freygish come from?
Our harmonies, of course, come about from the pitch set we use to make our melodies. Here we have a pitch set that is not entirely foreign to Western Classical and folk musics. After all, rotate the pitch order and you have the "harmonic minor scale." But the harmonic minor is a bit of a red-herring. The true, dare I say diatonic, pitch set for a "true" Western Classical minor is actually a combination of what we call the natural, the harmonic, and the melodic minor scales. And all of those scales and harmonies are simply the result of taste and use. The music comes first, then the theory, and then more music, which may or may not adhere to the theory,1 and then the theory (hopefully) changes to accommodate the new musical phenomena.
What we have in freygish is a pitch set from Jewish liturgical music, that is also a pitch set from Turkish maqam, and from Persian maqam, and from Arabic maqam, and from Indian ragas — this set occurs in a lot of different musics!2 As we've seen before, much of these musics were either unaccompanied so you just had a melody, or they were performed over a drone. In klezmer, we are mixing some musical practices from the synagogue with music practices from outside the synagogue. Outside the synagogue you have Europe and you have the Ottoman Empire, and this is where the "falling apart" of our theory gets interesting.
Where the theory doesn't apply shows how much seemingly innocent or unimportant things like music theory have traditionally determined what is and is not European. We talk about the Jews or the Roma or the Ottoman Empire — or do not talk is more like it — as if they are somehow totally, completely disconnected from Europe. Not only did the Ottoman Empire neighbor Europe it controlled much of what is now (and then?) considered Europe. Furthermore, Jewish and Roma and Turkish and Arabic and Persian peoples moved around and lived in Europe (and Europeans moved around, too), for a long time now. Was Serbia, for example, not European anymore when it was part of the Ottoman Empire? What about Greece? Moldova? Does it depend on what percentage of the population is practicing Christianity? Or who is using what scales and chords and instruments for their music?
Shimke Khazer tells the story of Simon Piglet (what a name!) who wants to improve his standing in life (who doesn't?). He moves to Istanbul but is murdered there. Magically, he is reborn, moves to America, and becomes so financially successful that he's memorialized in the annals of history. There's a lot to unpack there!
other recordings:
Daniel Khan & the Painted Bird. The Butcher's Share, Oriente. E freygish.
That is, plenty of new ideas in music come from extending a theoretical idea, which is simply taking a pattern and applying it where it hadn't been applied before.
For more on freygish see Ian Ring’s wildly comprehensive site, and Philip Tagg’s Everyday Tonality, p121-22 specifically discusses the term 'freygish' but p112-36 looks at the influence of Ottoman (incl. Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Jewish, et. al.) musics and their diaspora across cultures and styles. See also Walter Zev Feldman's monograph on klezmer.
Hi Andrea, just wanted to let you know that this spring I am going to be assigning your Substack to my NYU music education students, because it as an absolute gold mine for guitar and ukulele pedagogy. I was going to compile a resource exactly like this and you have saved me a ton of work, not to mention all the songs you have collected here that I had never heard of.