Projects & Programming
Ongoing Projects, Program Themes, and NewsThe Klezmer Institute exists as an organization in service to the community of practitioners, scholars, students, and organizations who are invested in Ashkenazic expressive culture and as a hub for year-round coordinated advocacy, projects, and programing in our subject areas. We are committed to developing and maintaining projects that advance knowledge, support creativity, and build community.
We are a network-based organization that creates in-person programming across North America and in Europe while seeking partnerships and connections across the globe.
Ongoing Programming
Trampled Manuscripts ARtist Residencies
Trampled Manuscripts: The Lost Klezmer Music of the An-ski Expeditions concert series and artist residency program connects today’s foremost klezmer musicians to a treasure trove of newly-available music from 100 years ago. These concerts are premiering selections from 1,400 newly-available tunes being digitized through Klezmer Institute’s 2020 international community-driven digital humanities project Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript (KMDMP). Programs center storytelling and connection, and audiences will hear everything from long-form concertos to elegant mazurkas and soulful Jewish wedding ritual melodies.
Visit the KMDMP Project Page to find PDF downloads of the KMDMP manuscript pages, and visit the KMDMP “In the Wild” Playlist to see videos created by project participants.
Ongoing Project
Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP)
A chance encounter in Tokyo a few years ago led to the sharing of a unique corpus of musical manuscripts from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine previously unavailable to klezmer musicians and scholars. The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project is an international digital humanities project connecting participants with the work of important klezmer musicians from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
The “KMDMP Commons” is the online gathering space for a growing community of musicians and scholars who are working together to unlock the secrets contained in these pages, and to bring this music to new life. Everyone is welcome to join, and you can participate by playing tunes, attending events, digitizing melodies, doing genealogy research, and helping out with translation and transliteration.
Visit the Klezmer Archive Page to find out more about this project. You can find KA Community Meetings and Coffe Hour Sessions on the KI YouTube Channel, and visit the project dev-blog here.
Ongoing Project
The Klezmer Archive Project
The Klezmer Archive (KA) project is creating a universally accessible digital archival tool for interaction, discovery, and research on available information about klezmer music and its network of contemporary and historical people. Taking individual melodies as the primary artifact, the digital archive will integrate existing tools and archival methods in novel ways to facilitate search and discovery rooted in the needs of its contemporary heritage community.
This project has been funded by National Endowment for the Humanities Phase I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from 2021-22.
Ongoing Interview Series
In Focus — Intimate Conversations with Amazing People
Join Klezmer Institute’s Christina Crowder to meet the people who have conducted some of the most important work in the documentation and transformation of Ashkenazic expressive culture. This series features intimate conversations with the folks who are doing the day-to-day work of cultural preservation and imaginitive transformation that puts a focus on the personal reflections and stories that may not be visible in the data sets, catalogues, recordings, and monographs that are the final outcomes of this kind of work.
