Perhaps Zev Feldman, as he is known in the Jewish musical world, was not born to write this book, but his whole life has prepared him for that task. A scholar, teacher, and performer of Ottoman Turkish, Central Asian, and Jewish music, he was one of the pioneers of the so-called “klezmer revival,” or what he prefers to call following Mark Slobin, the klezmer revitalization of the late 1970s. In eastern Europe, the Yiddish term klezmer (plural klezmorim or [di] klezmer) designated a professional Jewish musician who performed at traditional Jewish weddings as part of a (usually small) ensemble known as a kapelye. The purely instrumental repertoire of these kapelyes survived into emigration, so it was not a genre that had died and had to be revived. Feldman writes that by 1976 he had begun using the term “klezmer music” to refer to the Jewish instrumental music that he had been studying, although he acknowledges the coinage of parallel Yiddish terminology (klezmerishe muzik) by the Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovskii in the late 1920s.

Feldman's magisterial work is in two parts. Part One, “The Klezmer Profession: Social and Artistic Function,” consists of six chapters dealing with such topics as “The Word Klezmer and Jewish Professional Musicians,” “The Jewish Wedding and Its Musical Repertoire” and, most original for a study of klezmer music, “East European Jewish Dance.” Feldman stresses the existence of a clear dividing line in traditional Jewish society between the instrumental music of the klezmer and vocal music, whether liturgical or folk or later theatrical.

Part Two, “Genre and Style in Klezmer Music,” is more technical. It contains ten chapters, including “The Genres and Repertoires of Klezmer Music,” “Rhythmic Melody among the Ashkenazim” and studies of the history and choreography of six dances. An important final chapter is called “Postlude: A Klezmer Legacy,” which contains among other things a list of ten topics for future research. An appendix provides an “Overview of Modal Usage in Klezmer Music.” A companion website (at www.oup.com/us/klezmer) contains musical notations and recorded musical examples. The website also includes two more appendixes, one dealing with “Archaic Folk Dances” and the other, with “Regional Centers of the Klezmorim.” This latter appendix is particularly interesting, as it reveals differences in repertoire and performance that characterized klezmorim from Vilna, Volhynia/Podolia (represented by Berdichev), Galicia, and Moldova.

Feldman defines klezmer music as “a fusion music,” parallel to Max Weinreich's characterization of Yiddish as a fusion language. Just as Weinreich identifies “stock languages” that contributed to Yiddish and “determinants,” the elements of those languages that were relevant to the development of Yiddish, Feldman defines “stock musical systems” and lists the determinants that they provided: “pre-modern pan-European dance music,” “early modern Western European dance music,” “Ashkenazic liturgical music,” “Greko-Turkish [music]” and “Moldavian instrumental music.” Feldman's discussion of the last two of these is informed by his studies of Ottoman Turkish music.

It is a shame that this outstanding work of scholarship is marred by the lack of copyediting. Surprisingly, the appendixes in the companion website are marked “uncorrected proof” and dated July 2016. Presumably, one advantage of a website is that it can be easily corrected and/or updated. Some textual or footnote references cannot be found in the thirteen-page bibliography. A reference on page 120 to an article by Izaly Zemtsovsky, for example, is said to be found in “Slobin 2001,” but there is no such item in the bibliography. The reference should have been to “Beregovski 2001,” a work edited by Slobin et al. M. Berlin is mentioned on page 139, but is not in the bibliography. Alphabetical order is not always observed in the bibliography or in the glossary. Kale badekn is listed in the glossary under badekn, while kale bazetsn is under kale. The glossary calls karahod a “Lithuanian term,” which is true only geographically; linguistically it is Belarusian and not derived from Russian khorovod.

There are numerous misspellings and incorrect transliterations. A random sample includes loshen instead of loshn (in loshn-koydesh and klezmer-loshn); Scholem (instead of Sholem) Aleichem and Tschachniki for Ansky's birthplace Chashniki; inconsistent use of kaleh for kale; fihren and opfihren instead of firn and opfirn; Brdiansk for Berdiansk. Kale baveynen is spelled correctly but mistranslated as “veiling the bride.” There is no city called Rimaszombat in Slovakia; the old Hungarian name was long ago replaced by the Slovak name Rimavská Sobota. And finally, a translated quotation on page 121 has the quoted author expressing the concern “lest [the Jewish lament] will not disappear … ”