10/01/2020 Announcing Project Initiatives and Website Update
Decades of scholarship, documentation, and oral transmission have preserved and furthered the vibrant expressive culture of the Ashkenazic Jews. Building on this work, the Klezmer Institute was founded in the fall of 2018 to serve as a research hub for community collaboration on the topics of klezmer and Hasidic music, Ashkenazic dance and Yiddish song. The Institute founders are excited to join a small group of international cultural organizations exclusively devoted to the study and performance of Ashkenazic expressive culture, and are looking forward to providing year-round programming and project support for practitioners and researchers at all levels.
The Klezmer Institute is led by Artistic Director Walter Zev Feldman, one of the foundational figures in the klezmer revival and author of the seminal survey of European klezmer history, Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (OUP, 2016). Operations Director Christina Crowder is a performer and researcher on klezmer music, and a former Fulbright scholar to Romania to study the cross-pollination between Romanian and Jewish music in the region. Development Director Clara Byom is a musicologist and arts administrator who studies the mid-twentieth century American klezmer canon and the klezmer revitalization period.
Bridging the gap between academia and practitioners is a guiding principle for Klezmer Institute programming. Klezmer Institute projects seek to center practitioners and culture bearers as active participants in research projects alongside scholars and archivists, and to provide resources for musicians, singers, and dancers who are deeply invested in Ashkenazic expressive culture, but don’t have academic institutional affiliations.
Website Updates — New Resources
The Institute’s new website features a growing collection of previously unpublished articles, new bibliographic resources, and archival pages for several independent international klezmer music study projects that developed organically during the Covid-19 quarantine period in early 2020. Following the publication of the Institute’s first music folio, The Levitt Legacy Klezmer Folio Vol. 1 in 2019, several more publications are in the works, including folios of Moldavian folk music of interest to klezmer players, and a folio of mid-twentieth century American klezmer tunes. The Institute will also publish a history of eastern European klezmer for general audiences titled The Elusive Klezmer by Walter Zev Feldman, and is developing a project to publish a comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Jewish music’s seminal ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovsky collated and annotated by Evgenia Khazdan.
Fall 2020 Programming & Projects
Current programming includes the “Field Work in Focus” interview series with researchers who conducted field work on Jewish music topics in central and eastern Europe. Christina Crowder will host the series featuring internationally renowned klezmer clarinetist Christian Dawid, Hungarian ethnomusicologist Judit Frigyesi, Moldavian folklorist Vasile Chiselita, and Romanian folklorist Speranța Radulescu. Part two of the series will continue with interviews with archivists who have worked closely with current and historical field work collections.
The Institute is also launching the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) in late 2020, which is a project to digitally transcribe and translate music from scans of original field notebooks from the An-ski Expeditions of 1912-14 shared by the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine with linguist and klezmer violinist Anna Rogers in 2017. The project team includes scholars, archivists, programmers, and musicians from North America and Japan, who will coordinate volunteer digital transcriptions of the music and text from the folio pages with the goal of transforming this treasure of archival material into new digital and print formats that will be available to scholars and musicians everywhere.
These projects are envisioned with the goal of using twenty first-century connectivity to elevate the voices of those whose work is often seen as “distant” because of language, geography, or time. Institute programming seeks to acknowledge and uplift the dedication of musicians, singers, poets, and dancers along with researchers, writers, and archivists at all levels who invest time and energy into understanding the Ashkenazic expressive culture of the past while translating and transforming it into a vibrant, breathing community resource for today.
Support Our Work
The Klezmer Institute is seeking donor support and institutional collaborations for its project initiatives. Visitors are encouraged to join the Institute mailing list to receive occasional updates about projects, programming, and new resources. The Klezmer Institute is a registered 501c3 organization.
