I’m rewatching Curb Your Enthusiasm and very much enjoying the work of music supervisor Steven Rasch. In season five, episode eight, Larry pretends to be an Orthodox Jew to win over the head of the Kidney Consortium. To soundtrack the scene where Larry first meets the guy, Rasch chose a classic klezmer tune, “Tanz Tanz Yidelekh”, which is Yiddish for “Dance dance Jews.” Yes, that is the title.
I played this tune with F Train Klezmer back in the day and it’s a beauty. It’s also quite a music theory puzzle!
Here’s a good guitar arrangement and transcription:
And here’s my chart:
So here is the question: what key is this tune in? (Let’s ignore the B section for a minute and focus on the A and C sections.) Western tonal theory would say, obviously we are in A minor. All those E7 chords are dominant chords. The melody is mostly A harmonic minor, and that characteristic G-sharp is the leading tone in A minor. It makes a tense tritone with the D in E7, and your ear wants the tritone to resolve.
So, case closed, right? No! Voice leading and chord function are not the only things that make a chord feel like tonic. Metrical placement and emphasis matter too. When you take musical time into account, E7 feels more like home base to me. It’s the first and last chord in each section, and the melody starts and ends on its root note. The “resolutions” to Am are brief and metrically weak, which makes it feel to me more like a subdominant.
But what about Dm, the Western tonal theorist asks? We must be in A minor, because Dm is the subdominant in that key, and it’s nonsensical in E. But Klezmer is not only European. It’s also Middle Eastern. The A harmonic minor scale from E to E is called freygish mode in klezmer tradition. It’s known by various other names in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures, and in one form or another is ubiquitous in that part of the world. In freygish mode, Dm is a perfectly acceptable chord, acting much like a dominant chord would in Western European tonality.
Okay, so what about the B section? That is pretty clearly in C major in the first phrase, and definitely in A minor in the second phrase. This time, not only is there an E7 chord doing the usual Western tonal job of a dominant chord, but the A minor is also in a metrically strong position. This part of the tune functions exactly the way that Mozart or Beethoven would.
If the tune was only its A and C sections, I would say it was in E freygish mode. If it was only the B section, I would say it was in A minor. Taken together, the tune feels to me like it’s in both E freygish and A minor. And why not? Having an ambiguous key center is not at all unusual in repetitive dance musics; half the songs in current pop have no clear single tonic. The fact that “Tanz Tanz Yidelekh” sometimes works like a Middle Eastern tune and sometimes like a Western European one reflects the cultural hybridity of my Jewish ancestors. And it should make us skeptical of any claim that the V7-I cadence is always the main structuring element in harmony.