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Isaak Loberan

Podolia - Freylekhsland - Klezmer Music from Podolia (Ukraine) - Book II

This book contains tunes from a collection compiled by P.D. Pasechnik, the head of a local brass band from Mogilev-Podolsk (Podolia, Ukraine). The collection consists of over 200 tunes. This book contains the first 76 tunes. The remaining tunes can be found in Book 3 and Book 4 of Isaak Loberans Klezmer books.

All the information in this book is given in English and Russian language.

The price of this book is 28 Euros.

Table of contents (Pdf)

Volume I       Book III

Overview on all the books

From the Introduction:

Podolia - Freylekhsland is based on materials collected during ethnological expeditions in Podolia in 2002. In October 2002, Rayisa Gusak (a folklore specialist from Kiev) and I travelled to Mogilev-Podolsk, where we met Roman Trakhtengerts, head of the local Jewish community. He kindly allowed us to (stay) overnight at his place, telling us about Jewish life in Mogilev-Podolsk. The next morning he acquainted us with local musicians whom we interviewed, noting down their klezmer repertoire. The leader of the brass band, clarinetist Vladimir Larionov, gave us a small, thick notebook with pages of music for us to photocopy.

These pages contained more than two hundred freylekhs, alternatively called „freylik“ or „freylis“ in that region. After familiarizing myself with the music, I was astonished at the rich and melodious variety of the repertoire, in spite of the fact that the name of all the dances was the same („freylik“), and all of the dances were in two-four time. Naturally, the repertoire of these musicians was not limited to dances only in common time. I also recorded waltzes and Moldavian hora melodies in triple time. Such a quantity of melodies in a single collection testifies to the unusual popularity of freylekhs and to extraordinary demand for this kind of wedding music in the region of Podolia. The predominant part of the repertoire was Jewish music, but there were also a few melodies of Ukrainian and Moldavian origin.

There were different types of Jewish dances all found under the name of „freylik“: „Mazeltov“, „Khosid“, „Marsh“, „Sher“ and „Bulgar“. The earliest of these melodies was dated 19/10/1958 and the last 21/3/1979. Most interesting is the signature of the author: „P.D. Pasechnik“, which means that Pasechnik passed the collection of melodies on to Larionov when he retired. Such a phenomenon is not uncommon among musicians. Sometimes musical instruments were even inherited. Some melodies from this collection coincided with the repertoire from other brass bands I recorded in that region.