56 New Klezmer Tunes for Dancing, Volume 1. Composed by Nat Seelen. New Klezmer Studios. 2023.

Reviewed by Christina Crowder

Boston-based clarinetist, bandleader, and music educator Nat Seelen has published a volume of klezmer-inspired melodies titled 56 New Klezmer Tunes for Dancing, Volume 1. The tunes are fresh and inventive, but the volume falls short in presenting tunes that could be used for Yiddish dancing. This may in part be attributed to the general revival-era decoupling of klezmer music intended for dancing from a living Jewish dance tradition as tunes were increasingly performed on the concert stage rather than mutual aid society balls or weddings. On the other hand, the 2010s brought a number of important resources online for performers and composers, including: a growing body of historical and musicological scholarship on klezmer dance music; [1] an ongoing effort within the klezmer community to teach both dance and playing for dancing; and, thousands of North American and European klezmer recordings now easily available online via the Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings (University of Wisconsin, Madison), the Recorded Sound Archive (Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton), YIVO, and other archives. While not all new klezmer compositions need to fit squarely within the traditional dance genres, when departures such as Seelen’s are intentional it serves the audience and the community writ-large to share their reasoning in notes on individual tunes or in introductory remarks. Because the folio presents the tunes specifically as dance music, this review will focus on structural analysis of tunes for danceability within the stated genre, and playability with regard to historically-informed klezmer practice in those genres rather than an evaluation of compositional issues.

Seelen’s tunes are presented without commentary in five sections: Freylekhs (22), Bulgar (24), Zhok (8), Sher (2), and Kolomeyke (5). From a technical perspective, three choices stand out: use of 4/4 time signature for freylekhs and sher; lack of key signatures; and, no tempo markings. The first two move well away from standard klezmer notation practice, and the third is a missed opportunity to clarify intended dance tempos. While the use of 4/4 is defensible for bulgar—and is increasingly used in the revival era—it is much harder to justify for freylekhs. Joel Rubin notes, “The evidence that the dance tunes in klezmer music follow a four-beat cycle is . . . not compelling” (2020, p. 120), and pre-WWII published and manuscript metrical klezmer dance tunes are overwhelmingly notated in 2/4. [2] For experienced klezmer musicians, encountering tunes labeled as freylekhs in 4/4 is deeply disorienting, as is the lack of key signatures. While potentially convenient for players in the jazz tradition, these two choices do little to help non-jazz musicians and (perhaps more importantly) newcomers to klezmer. By contrast, seminal Jewish musicologist Moishe Beregovski followed written klezmer practice in setting freylekhs and sher in 2/4 time and he chose to innovate in his notations through the use of modal key signatures for Freygish and Misheberakh modes, which helps performers identify the dominant tonic and mode in a piece and accentuates the distinct features of klezmer modalities—an early form of “de-colonizing” the shoehorning of Ashkenazic modality into western key signatures.

Turning to the two largest sections—freylekhs and bulgar—many tunes are miscategorized by genre when viewed from a traditional dance perspective. In the freylekhs section, only eleven of twenty-two pieces could plausibly be played for freylekhs. Of the remaining eleven, five read as honga (or hora Moldoveneasca), four have strong bulgar characteristics, and two split the difference between bulgar and freylekhs. While the distinction between freylekhs and bulgar blurs significantly over the course of the twentieth century, the blurring goes in one direction: freylekhs is incorporated into bulgar, and there is no evidence that the signature triplet figures of bulgar were ever significantly incorporated into freylekhs compositions—which itself declined dramatically. Likewise, honga is a dance of Moldavian origin characterized by extensive passages of running sixteenth notes and simple rhythmic accompaniment. The dance itself is a simple step-and-stamp pattern with an emphasis on the stamp on the off-beat. Tunes 5–6, and 13–15 show this rhythmic structure. By contrast, freylekhs can be generalized as “happy walking” with an accompaniment that emphasizes upward motion in the off-beat. The structural indications of rhythmic placement are strong indicators of what kind of dance can be performed to a given tune, and this section might benefit from further genre refinement.  

While ten of the twenty-four tunes classified as bulgars do play through as classic bulgars, six are really more suited for freylekhs, three others resemble hongas, and the remaining five are ambiguous for different reasons. Of particular note in interpreting the bulgars for dancing is the extensive use of sixteenth notes compositionally within the tunes. In both early and modern klezmer bulgar, sixteenth note runs are (on the rare occasions where they occur) used as chromatic passages to connect phrases or as brief, elaborative flourishes within melodies that are otherwise almost exclusively composed of alternating patterns of eighth notes and eighth note triplets. [3] Several of Seelen’s bulgars use sixteenth notes as through-composed compositional elements, or as notated elaboration of a simpler musical skeleton. This non-standard use of sixteenth notes wouldn’t be a problem if these tunes weren’t explicitly intended for dancing. The seven tunes of this type cannot reasonably be played for dancing bulgar because shifting to long sixteenth note passages changes the texture of the tune and breaks the bulgar “clave.”  

Another notable aspect of the freylekhs and bulgar sections is the narrow range of modal and tonal use, with only one tune beginning unambiguously in major, eight in Freygish (lowered second), and five in ambiguous or multiple modalities. The remaining thirty-two melodies are in minor (13) or the related misheberakh (raised fourth) (20) modes. By contrast, mid-century bulgar repertoire as analyzed by Clara Byom shows a much more even mix between major/freygish and minor/misheberakh modalites. This is certainly a compositional choice, but forgoing a deeper exploration of major and freygish feels like a missed opportunity. Likewise, all but two of 56 Tunes have a tonal center of D, which is another missed opportunity to explore different core tonalities. 

The two shers would make wonderful  “Concert Freylekhs,” such as are found in the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project corpus, German Goldenshtayn’s repertoire, and Emil Kroitor’s compositions. However, they are not well-suited for dancing the sher (a Jewish descendant of the early German contra dance). The two melodies are elaborate, through-composed pieces with a great deal of chromaticism, harmonic complexity, and virtuosic sixteenth note passages that unfold in a series of often non-repeating sections of differing lengths. By contrast, traditional shers are almost exclusively composed of eight-bar sections in 2/4. Though sections include sixteenth and eighth note passages, they tend to unfold in relatively simple statements, often with repeating or parallel figures of four sixteenth notes. The zhok section contains eight tunes suitable for dancing, and No. 6 is particularly lovely. The five Kolomeykes do not include any of the essential rhythmic or structural components of Ukrainian or Jewish-adapted kolomeyke, such as ABAC structures within sections or the strong quarter note beats at the end of sections.

While the melodies presented in this collection are inventive and fun as a series of klezmer-inspired tunes, too many of them are structurally unsuitable as accompaniment for their stated dance genres. This has the potential to add further confusion to what is already a general lack of understanding in the klezmer musician community of how structure, texture, tempo, and phrasing facilitate or block successful dancing in various genres. While it is true that the revival generation de-emphasized the connection between music and dance practice, this decades-long gap is actively being rectified today through scholarship, education, and digital humanities resources. I hope that for future editions of this folio and in new collections Seelen will see this as an opportunity for clarifying genre boundaries through careful reading of leading klezmer scholarship and will share his compositional process through notes and an introduction. 

Christina Crowder is the executive director of the Klezmer Institute, a  digital-first organization founded to support Ashkenazic expressive culture through research, teaching, publishing, and programming. She is a klezmer accordion player with thirty years of experience in performing, researching and teaching Ashkenazic klezmer music with a specialty in the intersection of Modavian and Jewish dance music, and is a founder of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) a crowdsourced initiative to digitally notate early twentieth century Ukrainian and Belarusian klezmer manuscripts. 

[1] The most comprehensive treatments of this topic include: Walter Zev Feldman, Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (Oxford University Press: 2016); Hankus Netsky, Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Jewish Philadelphia (Temple University Press: 2015); Joel Rubin, New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century (Boydell & Brewer: 2020); and Clara Byom‘s unpublished MA thesis “Mixing in Too Much Jewish: American Klezmorim in New York City From 1950-1970,” 2017.

[2] The exception is Hasidic dance tunes which seem to have historical evidence for 4/4 notation and the choice of meter has become a clue to the origin of pieces in the KMDMP corpus of early twentieth-century Belarusian and Ukrainian handwritten klezmer manuscripts.

[3] Sam Musiker’s “Sam Shpielt” recorded for the Tanz! album in 1956 is an exception that proves the rule. The piece opens with an elaborate, chromatic ascending line and has several other extended passages of running sixteenth notes. It is a masterpiece of Musiker’s vision for a new, virtuosic klezmer blended with jazz and bebop influences, and while in the hands of a skilled drummer, this piece could be inserted in the later part of a dance set, it functions better as a piece for listening than for dancing. Furthermore, it is one of only two among 108 mid-century bulgars analyzed by Clara Byom that include more than passing sixteenth note runs. Bulgar no. 7 references “Sam Spielt,” but without fully developing the impulse, and with no open phrasing to contrast the density.