Point on the finger chart heard and will put that on my todo list.
Jerry,
Happy Chanukah… I sent this to you and was going to call or email you and forgot to. So the whistle arrived a bit mysteriously.
The standard Ahava Rabba whistle has seven holes, the extra pinky hole descends down to ‘C’ because a lot of Klezmer songs drop down below the root note of the scale: C - D Eb F# G A Bb C D
Ahava Rabba mode is sort of a major and minor mode - it has elements of both.
Now just have learn how to do a good krekht on a whistle.
Krekht = (sigh, moan, sob…), a short glissando towards the shrill.
One of the Klezmer ornaments is humorously called Kvetsh (complaining).
Yeah-- I have a book of Klez tunes and some of the key signatures are really odd looking, with both sharps and flats! This particular book uses this to avoid having too many accidentals in the tune itself.
On NPR this morning was a story about how culturally complicated the holiday season can be. At the end of the story is “March of the Sugarplum Fairies” played in a Klezmer mode. It starts at about 3:00 minutes of the track:
OK, I broke down and got me some free webhosting (the horror!)
If anyone still cares at this point, they are available from this
primitive webpage: http://fearfaoin.tripod.com/Tunes/
(sorry about all the ads)
As stated on the page:
Donnybrook_ahava.mp3 is Donnybrook Fair on the Ahava Rabba whistle
Donnybrook_sweetone.mp3 is Donnybrook Fair on a Freeman-tweaked
SweeTone (so you see how the tune sounds in D major)
Lets_Be_Cheerful.mp3 is a tune that’s originally in the Ahava
Rabba mode, called Let’s Be Cheerful, Said the Rabbi
