Klezmer Institute awarded NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for Klezmer Archive Project.
Klezmer Institute sets an ambitious goal to create an innovative tool for the preservation and study of music from oral traditions.
The Klezmer Institute is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a Phase I Digital Humanities Access Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2021-2022. The Klezmer Archive project aims to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music. The project will adapt and apply methodology from computational musicology and library sciences to create a tool to facilitate study of the klezmer corpus in a deeper, more systematic manner and on a more comprehensive scale than previously possible. This digital archive will be an important resource for Jewish music studies, and will also benefit researchers in the fields of corpus studies, computational musicology, and library sciences.
The project brings together a team of archivists, music theorists, UX specialists, and programmers, the majority of whom are klezmer musicians. A public-facing devblog (developer blog) will be announced in January 2021, and will be where the team makes announcements, shares progress, and invites community feedback.
We are honored to receive this grant and cannot wait to share more about this project with you! Stay tuned for much more!
Read the NEH Press release here.
“For cultural communities that are interested in maintaining continuity with the past within a living tradition, the ability to capture the accumulated knowledge of current practitioners as well as documentation made in the past is an important potential tool.”
Background
The genesis of the project grew from the work of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP), which was created to release scans of 850 pages of handwritten Jewish music manuscripts from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine acquired by Anna Rogers (nee Gladkova) in 2017 with assistance from the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. As the Kiselgof project developed, the idea to use this corpus as the test case for a larger digital archive project began to emerge. As the scope of the project expanded, the team grew to include experts in software engineering, user experience, and archivists and scholars, the majority of whom are also klezmer musicians themselves, which gives the team as a whole invaluable, deep domain expertise.
“This will be a huge advance in recognition and visibility for eastern European Jewish music studies within our circle and out to the larger world.”
Project Team
Christina Crowder, Klezmer Institute (Project Director)
Clara Byom, Klezmer Institute (Project Coordinator, Grant Administrator)
Eléonore Biezunski, Associate Sound Archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Dan Kunda Thagard, Independent Software Developer
Yonatan Malin, Associate Professor in the College of Music and Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado – Boulder
Max Rothman, Senior Software Engineer at Reify Health
Lyudmila Sholokhova, Curator of the Dorot Jewish Collection at the New York Public Library
Matthew Stein, Designer at Enigmida and Independent Computational Musicologist and Software Engineer
Schyler VerSteeg, Product and UX Researcher at CVS Health
Project Advisors
Walter Zev Feldman, Senior Research Fellow at New York University – Abu Dhabi
Mark Kligman, Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at University of California – Los Angeles
Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Siegel – Research Librarian at New York Public Library
Anna Rogers, University of Copenhagen
Pete Rushefsky, Executive Director at Center for Traditional Music and Dance
Mark Slobin, Professor Emeritus of Music at Wesleyan University
Support
This project has been made possible in part by the
National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov
“As a music theorist whose interests lie in computational and empirical methods, I am excited by the fact that an oral tradition such as Klezmer music … could be made available for future researchers and students to explore. This will change the conversations we have about how tonality, folk music, improvised music, and oral traditions work in music, and is an astonishingly important project ….”
*Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
