Klezmer Institute awarded NEH Scholarly Editions Grant for Kiselgof-Makonovtesky Critical Editions.
The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Critical Editions will be the first comprehensive publication of a significant Jewish instrumental corpus since Moshe Beregovski undertook his field work in 1930s Soviet Ukraine.
Klezmer Institute is delighted to announce that it has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions grant for 2022-2024 for the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Critical Editions Project. Led by Walter Zev Feldman (Klezmer Institute) as Project Director and Christina Crowder (Klezmer Institute) as Managing Editor, this two year grant will develop a plan for a series of Critical Editions based on the digital musical corpus and associated text in the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project, physically housed at the Institute of Manuscripts at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.
Read the NEH Press Release Here.
Dr. Feldman will be joined by Dr. Helen Beer (University College London, Jewish Music Institute), and Dr. Asya Vaisman Schulman (National Yiddish Book Center) as collaborating scholars who will be responsible for overseeing and guiding the language component of the KMDMP series. Clara Byom (Klezmer Institute) will be the Project Coordinator and Grants Administrator. Development and production of the volumes will be a collaborative effort between the project scholars and the most active, skilled members of the KMDMP community in a novel form of public scholarship that flows from the community’s investment into the KMDMP Digital Humanities project.
Klezmer, the instrumental music of Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe, is largely based in oral tradition but has also relied on handwritten sheet music for generations. Before November 2020, the only readily accessible collection of early twentieth-century European instrumental repertoire was Moshe Beregovski’s Jewish Instrumental Folk Music (Syracuse 2001; 2015). The manuscripts made available in the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Critical Editions will broaden the range of accessible resources, re-center the repertoires of key klezmer musician informants, and will contextualize the work of Europe’s revered twentieth-century Jewish ethnomusicological researchers. These volumes will present material across a range of klezmer, liturgical, Hasidic, and non-Jewish genre and style encapsulated in the manuscripts.
Although this will be a music critical edition series, it will be a space for equally important work with Yiddish and Russian texts from the early twentieth century. Dr. Helen Beer and Dr. Asya Vaisman Schulman will lead the language editorial team, which will develop ways to standardize dialect transliteration, present the dialects alongside the YIVO standardized Yiddish, and facilitate the understanding of old handwritten Yiddish and dialects. While Yiddish language passages are most extensive, Russian and Ukrainian are also used throughout the manuscripts. These present unique issues, such as the use of old, pre-revolutionary orthography, abbreviations that may or may not be easily decipherable, misspellings, local words that are no longer known, and a fluidity between Russian and Yiddish. This kind of detailed, dialect-aware work has not been done on this scale before and will serve as a model for future Yiddish language projects.
Editorial policies for language and music developed for the KMDMP corpus will inform work in the Klezmer Archive Project, another NEH-supported digital humanities project run by the Klezmer Institute. The Klezmer Archive will be a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music.
The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Critical Editions will be the first comprehensive publication of a significant Jewish instrumental corpus since Moshe Beregovski undertook his field work in 1930s Soviet Ukraine, culminating in his dissertation defense in Moscow in 1944. Freed from the ideological restrictions that Beregovski navigated, a team informed by current scholarship will be able to offer a far more comprehensive presentation of the music collected by Kiselgof and notated by Makonovetsky. The series will be an invaluable resource for both scholars in Ashkenazic Jewish studies and klezmer practitioners. It has the potential to be a ground-breaking resource for Yiddish linguists, and will make a substantial, Western Classical-adjacent digital music corpus available for musicologists, particularly in computational musicology and corpus studies.
About Klezmer Institute
Klezmer Institute is a digital-first organization founded to support Ashkenazic expressive culture through research, teaching, publishing, and programming. Ashkenazic expressive culture encompasses the musical and physical expression of eastern European Jewish culture through music, song, and dance. Klezmer Institute projects use digital humanities tools to define and document the unique musical heritage of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe, and to increase communication and collaboration between professional and amateur musicians, dancers, and scholars throughout the world. Klezmer Institute champions Ashkenazic expressive culture through digital preservation and contemporary performance as an important means to understand Jewish culture in the past, and as a springboard to inspire new generations to engage with an essential cultural legacy.
About the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project
The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) is an international digital humanities project to make materials collected by Zinovy Kiselgof during An-ski Expeditions, and the Makonovetsky Wedding Manuscript—long-preserved in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine—available for researchers, instrumentalists, and singers around the world to engage with first hand. The project seeks to use modern digital humanities tools to transcribe and translate the music and notes contained in approximately 850 high-resolution scans from hand-written notebooks (hefts) and catalogue into digital formats for further study and performance. The KMDMP community includes more than 200 participants from around the world who digitally notate, translate, perform and teach music from the corpus. In less than two years, more than two thirds of the corpus of 1,400 melodies has been digitized by project volunteers.
Defining Ashkenazic Expressive Culture
Ashkenazic expressive culture is about more than “folk music.” Expressive culture is a way to describe a continuum of embodied cultural practice that incorporated elements from both religious and secular life performed in a wide variety of spaces—from the hearth to the street, and from the wedding canopy to the Yiddish theater stage. This rich tapestry incorporates threads from musical cultures as diverse as the western European baroque to the Greek butchers of Ottoman Istanbul; draws on a centuries-long connection between guild klezmorim and the professional Roma Lăutar musicians of Moldova; and, integrates elements of folk musics of the many co-territorial lands of Ashkenazic eastern Europe.
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
*Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
