Beregovsky, Moisei (EN)

Beregovsky Moisei Iakovlevich, *23 (11) January 1892 Termakhivka, †12 August 1961 Kiev, Ukrainian ethnomusicologist. In 1915–20, he studied cello at the Kiev Conservatory and composition under B. Yavorsky. Between 1928 and 1950, he worked in various departments of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR; between 1937 and 1941 and 1944 and 1948, he headed the ethnographic studio at the Kiev Conservatory. In 1943, he received a candidate of arts degree.

Beregovsky was an outstanding researcher of Jewish music in Eastern Europe. In his research, he focused on the socio-cultural context of music, disregarding issues of classification and analysis. He assembled a vast collection of recordings and transcriptions of Jewish folk music and developed a system for cataloging them. Of the planned five-volume series devoted to Jewish folk music (song and drama in Yiddish, instrumental music), only one volume (1934) was published due to a ban on further publication. Beregovsky’s dramatic fate (the outbreak of World War II, several years in the gulag in the 1950s) meant that his life’s work remained unfinished. Beregovsky’s most important works are to be published by M. Slobin, R. Rothstein, and M. Alpert (Syracuse University Press, 1998–99) and in the «Yuval Series of the Jewish Music Research Center» in Jerusalem.