Collective Singing in the Jewish Shtetl

Abstract

Traditional collective singing among Eastern Yiddish speakers – a heretofore unexplored phenomenon – is discussed as part of the European-Jewish musical polysystem, which evolved in small towns (called a shtetl in Yiddish) from early modernity to the Holocaust (1933–1945). In the absence of living informants in Eastern Europe, the only applicable methodology is historical ethnomusicology, employing a comparative analysis of late documentation, in light of premodern literary sources, with the goal of reconstructing and describing musical semiotics. It reveals that the main types of collective singing were marked by an interaction from the idiom of instrumental music – (klezmer) intonatsia, apparently due to the latter’s symbolism as representing the communal experience of a wedding. Liturgical refrains, folk-theatre choruses, wedding songs, paraliturgical domestic chants, and Hasidic wordless tunes shared specific musical patterns and overall aesthetic principles – a preference for asymmetry and a combination of old Ashkenazi and Slavic features. Although not central to the traditional music by Yiddish speakers, these collective songs comprised a significant constituent of the European soundscape.