The article is a collaboration of two research projects: first one is the new an- notated edition of Moisei Beregovskii’s collection of Hassidic tunes (1946) in prepa- ration by Yaakov Mazor in the framework of the Jewish Music Research Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The second project is a collaborative Israeli- Ukrainian project titled “The Hassidic Nign in Right Bank Ukraine and East Galicia: Between Autochthonous and External Soundscapes” lead by the three additional au- thors of the present article. The article is dedicated to the study of music in Ukrainian Hasidism, the main representative kind of which is nign – a religious song, performed mainly without words, by men, solo or collectively, in a monophonic texture, and fulfilling various religious functions of mystical background. Nign has apparently started to crystallize from the mid-eighteenth century onwards on the territories of Podillya and Volyn, with the consolidation of the Hassidic movement in those areas of Ukraine (then Po- land and later on the Russian Empire). Noticed by many scholars, the affinity that the Hassidic tunes have with the mu- sic of both Jewish and their co-territorial non-Jewish societies in Ukraine has led to the key question of this study, which is: What insights one can gain from the compara- tive analysis of melodies to the fuller picture of the Ukrainian Hassidic soundscape. The methodology of the study of the Hassidic nign in its historical, regional and conceptual Ukrainian contexts is based on comparative analysis of the nign (the nign itself attributed to the founder of the Chernobyl dynasty, Rabbi Mordechai of Cher- nobyl, its tune transcribed by M. Beregovskii from memory in 1920 and republished many times), its another version transcribed by Joseph Achron, and the four Ukrainian compositions from the anthology of Ukrainian folk melodies by Z. Lysko. The preliminary results of the comparative study of these musical texts in terms of form, modality, melodic contour, rhythm and performance practice, in this stage of the research show more differences than similarities between Hassidic and Ukrainian musical texts and contexts.
“Nign 3” from Beregovskii’s Jewish Folk Tunes Without Words: An Intro- duction to the Study of Hassidic Music in its Ukrainian Context
