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The latest addition to my collection of music is a book of Jewish folk music my parents mailed me only a year or so ago. I'd never seen it before, but it, like the others, belonged to my grandmother; it dates from the 1960s and is actually older than several of her other books. Almost all the tunes in the book are in minor keys, so although many of the melodies are extremely simple, usual for folk music, it suits my taste much better than the average book of songs.
My preference for minor over major keys goes back as far as I can remember and is so viscerally strong that I not infrequently can't listen to more than twenty seconds or so of a slow ballad in a major key before being overcome with disgust. I tend to express this as hating ballads or hating slow songs, but actually I like slow ballads in minor keys.
There is obviously a cultural tradition behind the dominance of minor music in jewish folksong, or rather several cultural traditions behind it, since the sources of the melodies in the book come from historic jewish communities from both eastern Europe and Africa (and one can hardly call the Polish, Ukrainian, and Romanian communities one culture because they were all in Europe). The emotional color of different modes of music has been written extensively about, I know, while I've encountered just a little of that theory. If the minor modes are expressive of mourning, suffering, and oppression, then certainly the times and places that produced this jewish music more than support that, as does a great deal of jewish history; but there's a vast amount of music in the book that's happy, cheerful, or upbeat in minor keys as well, going by the notation and translations of the lyrics. Perhaps the influence of what I keep seeing described as "eastern music" is a better explanation for the pattern.
They're not very challenging to play for the most part, so they aren't the most useful practice material; when people perform simple folk melodies they are meant to embellish them themselves, often through successive repeats, and obviously how one does that is an art that can be studied, but it isn't a skill I have yet. Consequently, another book that belonged to my grandmother, called The Robbins Collection of 200 Jigs, Reels, and Country Dances, is much more useful to practice. The plurality of it is Celtic music, about 60-70% of that Irish, and this familiar style is, even in the simple versions of the melodies, more challenging; although after a couple of weeks I'm now seriously impatient to get an Irish tin whistle, because the sound of a soprano recorder playing a tin whistle's part is maddeningly close-but-not-quite-right. (Apparently they're pretty cheap and knowing how to play the recorder should make them easy enough to play, although they lack a thumb hole.)
My preference for minor over major keys goes back as far as I can remember and is so viscerally strong that I not infrequently can't listen to more than twenty seconds or so of a slow ballad in a major key before being overcome with disgust. I tend to express this as hating ballads or hating slow songs, but actually I like slow ballads in minor keys.
There is obviously a cultural tradition behind the dominance of minor music in jewish folksong, or rather several cultural traditions behind it, since the sources of the melodies in the book come from historic jewish communities from both eastern Europe and Africa (and one can hardly call the Polish, Ukrainian, and Romanian communities one culture because they were all in Europe). The emotional color of different modes of music has been written extensively about, I know, while I've encountered just a little of that theory. If the minor modes are expressive of mourning, suffering, and oppression, then certainly the times and places that produced this jewish music more than support that, as does a great deal of jewish history; but there's a vast amount of music in the book that's happy, cheerful, or upbeat in minor keys as well, going by the notation and translations of the lyrics. Perhaps the influence of what I keep seeing described as "eastern music" is a better explanation for the pattern.
They're not very challenging to play for the most part, so they aren't the most useful practice material; when people perform simple folk melodies they are meant to embellish them themselves, often through successive repeats, and obviously how one does that is an art that can be studied, but it isn't a skill I have yet. Consequently, another book that belonged to my grandmother, called The Robbins Collection of 200 Jigs, Reels, and Country Dances, is much more useful to practice. The plurality of it is Celtic music, about 60-70% of that Irish, and this familiar style is, even in the simple versions of the melodies, more challenging; although after a couple of weeks I'm now seriously impatient to get an Irish tin whistle, because the sound of a soprano recorder playing a tin whistle's part is maddeningly close-but-not-quite-right. (Apparently they're pretty cheap and knowing how to play the recorder should make them easy enough to play, although they lack a thumb hole.)
