Klezmer Archive Community Meeting
You’ve heard about the Klezmer Archive and now’s your chance to meet the team!
Klezmer Institute invites you to a Community Meeting about the Klezmer Archive Project. Funded for a two-year, Phase 1 Digital Humanities Access Grant by the NEH, the Klezmer Archive project aims to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music.
10:30 PDT | 1:30 EDT | 6:30 London | 7:30 Berlin | 8:30 Moscow
Click here to register for the meeting
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Our goal is nothing less than to realize the long-standing dream of so many members of the klezmer community—to create a space to capture and highlight the myriad connections between tunes, performers, genre, and place. Beyond that rather modest goal, we’re also setting ourselves the task of creating a digital environment that will allow culture-bearers and practitioners to add comments and commentary to individual tunes in a weighted system that will foreground the deep accumulated knowledge about practice, connections, and history within our community.
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.”
Who is this meeting for?
Join us on Zoom to meet the project team. We will reflect on our preparatory work in the beginning of the grant period and the vision of the archive as we see it today. We’ll talk about some of the technical challenges we’re considering, but also the philosophical aspects of the project design — from User Experience research to what we’ve come to call “fuzzy” tune and genre boundaries. And we want to hear from you too! There will be time for you to ask questions and share thoughts. While we likely won’t get to hear from everyone during this meeting, we’ll make ourselves available for further conversations with interested individuals. This will be a community resource, so we value your input right from the very beginning! We’re looking forward to meeting you!
“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.
