Moshe Beregovski

Moshe Beregovski, or Moisei Iakovlevich Beregovskii (Russian: Моисей Береговский) (1892 – 1961), was a Ukrainian Jewish folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He has been called the "foremost ethnomusicologist of Eastern European Jewry".^[1] His research gathered melodies and words of Yiddish folk songs, wordless melodies (nigunim), as well as Eastern European Jewish dance melodies (klezmer music).

From roughly 1929 to 1947, Beregovski made ethnographic trips collecting secular Jewish music in various parts of Ukraine. His works make up the largest and most carefully notated collection of its kind in prewar Europe. Mark Slobin, who arranged and republished much of Beregovki's collection in the United States, has said in an interview that Beregovski "was the only person to do this for Yiddish music, and he was an excellent ethnomusicologist."^[2] He made roughly 2,000 field recordings on 700 phonograph cylinders.^[3]

In 1944, Beregovksi received his Ph.D. from the Moscow Conservatory, writing his dissertation on the topic of Jewish instrumental folk music.^[3] He was also a contemporary of such Eastern European ethnomusicologists as Bela Bartok, and worked to meticulously expand the work of previous Eastern European Jewish ethnomusicologists such as A.Z. Idelsohn, Yoel Engel, S. An-Sky, and Y.L. Cahan.^[4]

Beregovski was the head of the Cabinet for Jewish Musical Folklore in the ethnographic section of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Kiev.^[3] He continued his research during the period of Stalinist repression of the 1930s under what must have been great ideological pressure,^[1] as state-funded musical research in the Soviet Union necessarily followed Marxist-Leninist lines.^[5]

The institute itself was later closed down and many of its members exiled and disgraced. In 1949, Beregovski's department was closed and he was arrested and sent to Tayshet, in the Irkutsk region, where he remained from 1951 to 1955. In 1956, he was “rehabilitated” and returned to Kiev, where he lived the rest of his life.^[3]

Beregovski's archive of wax cylinders was thought by many to have been destroyed during World War II, but it was discovered in a library in Kiev during the 1990s.^[2][5] Some of Beregovski's collections were republished by American ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin, first in 1981 as Old Jewish Folk Music and in an expanded volume in 2001 as Jewish Instrumental Folk Music.^[2] His collections of melodies have made their way into the repertoire of many current-day klezmer musicians such as Joel Rubin.

Sources

1. ^ ^{a b} p.253 "A Fresh Look at Beregovski's Folk Music Research" by Mark Slobin. Ethnomusicology, Vol. 30, No. 2
2. ^ ^{a b c} http://www.klezmershack.com/articles/robinson/010830.slobin.html
3. ^ ^{a b c d} http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Beregovskii_Moisei_Iakovlevich
4. ^ p.253-4 "A Fresh Look at Beregovski's Folk Music Research" by Mark Slobin. Ethnomusicology, Vol. 30, No. 2
5. ^ ^{a b} http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Music/Study_of_Jewish_Music

See also

• YIVO
• Ruth Rubin

Persondata
Name	Beregovski, Moshe
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1892
Place of birth
Date of death	1961
Place of death