Music is not a universal language and this klezmer song proves it

My man Adam has a word:

Music is the universal language the same way English is, in that it isn't

— Adam Neely (@its_adamneely) May 3, 2021

I can prove this with an example from my own life. When I was younger I got interested in my Jewish heritage and spent a couple of years playing klezmer music (shout out to F Train Klezmer!) There’s a beautiful tune called “Der Gassen Nigun”, in a minor key, with a moderate lurching waltz tempo and a dirgelike wailing melody. Here’s a lovely recording of it, by Harry Kandel and his Orchestra.

I heard this on The Rough Guide to Klezmer and assumed it was a funeral song. Maybe you did too. Nope! It’s the opposite: a wedding song. The title means “Street Song” because it’s the music that accompanies the procession from the wedding ceremony back to the bride and groom’s house. This is not music from some remote tribe in Papua New Guinea, this is my own great-grandparents in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. If I can’t even correctly interpret the music of my ancestors, how can anything be universal?

Let’s unpack the foreign-ness of this tune. Here’s my transcription:

The rhythm sounds unspecifically old-world to me. There’s lots of historical European music in triple meter, and I don’t have any particular associations with this start-stop groove. The melody starts off sounding “Jewish”, but also still pretty “Western”–the first eight bars are in D natural minor and F major. But then in bars nine through twelve, what happens? All of a sudden we have A-flat, B natural and E-flat! It sounds like F Dorian mode, but with a sharp fourth. This scale is variously called Mi Sheberach, Ukrainian, Altered Ukrainian, Doina, Altered Dorian, or Ov Horachamim mode. The underlying chords sound like an attempt to harmonize this very non-Western scale in Western terms, and I find them unbearably beautiful and mysterious.

At the end of the first section, in bar fourteen, there’s another violation of Western European harmonic norms, as the melody does one of those Arabic-sounding turns, passing E-flat on its way back to the tonic. Together with the bass, this implies a C minor chord, which is very much not allowed in Western D minor. In Jewish music, however, it’s routine, part of a mode called Yishtabach. The entire B and C sections of “Der Gassen Nigun” are in D Mi Sheberach with a raised leading tone, all over a D pedal. The winding, curling melodic shape and static harmony sound much more Middle Eastern than European. (Thank you Klezmer Shack for the scale references.)

Anyway. The idea of “musical universals” very quickly devolves into “Western European music is universal”, and that is some white nonsense. There might be some broad overlaps between disparate forms of human music, just as there are similarities in our cooking and clothing and languages and so on. But the particulars are always going to be culturally specific.