Integrating the Past: Yiddish Summer Weimar to Host Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project this Summer
“For the past 20 years, YSW has pursued a hands-on, project-based approach to learning and transmitting Yiddish and related musical cultures through co-creation that brings together scholars, performers and audiences,”
—Alan Bern, Artistic Director, YSW
From the YSW / KI Joint Press Release:
This year, Yiddish Summer Weimar (YSW), Europe’s preeminent annual Yiddish culture festival, hosts the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP), an international digital humanities project launched in November 2020 by the Klezmer Institute. KMDMP seeks to digitize approximately 1,400 melodies and associated text notes from klezmer manuscripts preserved in the Institute of Manuscripts at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. These handwritten notebooks were created in the course of expeditions through Eastern Europe shortly before the outbreak of WWI with the goal of documenting and protecting Jewish music and culture. This was realized through sound recordings, transcriptions of performed instrumental and vocal melodies, and photographs.
The project represents an innovative approach to crowdsourcing the digitization process of hand-written music notation and text that is not available for processing via optical character recognition platforms, and which relies on the specialized knowledge of klezmer musicians, Yiddishists and Russian-speakers to interpret. To date, project volunteers have engraved approximately 450 melodies, representing about a third of the entire corpus.
In the Spring of 2017 Walter Zev Feldman presented a lecture on Jewish dance in Tokyo, followed by a workshop with Chitoshi Hinoue’s klezmer ensemble, which Mariko Mishiro (Tokyo University of the Arts) and Anna Rogers (née Gladkova, University of Tokyo) both attended. Feldman discussed the importance of the Kiselgof collections with Ms. Rogers before her upcoming journey to Kyiv, and Mariko Mishiro obtained a formal request for research access to the Kiselgof materials held at the Institute of Manuscripts. Rogers traveled to Kyiv that summer and was granted permission to create high-quality photographs of the pages of several notebooks housed in Archive #190.
The material comprises Jewish instrumental folk melodies collected by the Belarusian Jewish ethnographer Zusman Kiselgof (Zinovy Kiselgoff) during the An-ski field expeditions conducted between 1912-1914 in the Pale of Jewish Settlement (mostly modern Ukraine and Belarus). In collaboration with archivists in Kyiv who photographed the pages, Feldman helped partially translate Beregovski’s original catalogues from Yiddish, and Mariko Mishiro, Pete Rushefsky (CTMD) and Chitoshi Hinoue (Doshisha University, Kyoto) secured funding to cover the cost of the reproductions. In the end, about 850 photographs were produced, including over 1,000 musical items.
“KMDMP was developed on open-source principles and we have attracted an international community of about 200 volunteers who are working together to engrave, transcribe and translate the music and notes in the manuscripts. This approach reflects the creative impulse behind the act of ethnographic collection, which we hope to channel into the concert hall and many other venues.”
— Christina Crowder, KI
From Page to Stage — Performing Newly-Accesible Music
Developing interdisciplinary approaches to the study and performance of traditional music has been integral to Yiddish Summer since its inception. “For the past 20 years, YSW has pursued a hands-on, project-based approach to learning and transmitting Yiddish and related musical cultures through co-creation that brings together scholars, performers and audiences,” says festival founder and artistic director Dr. Alan Bern. “Engaging with this largely oral culture requires acquiring a range of skills that are not yet part of a standard Western musical education,” he adds.
Bern and Crowder view their cooperation as an important step toward establishing a transnational framework for the comprehensive study of Ashkenazic culture. “Klezmer is more than ‘just’ a musical style: it is an element of a larger fabric linking the Yiddish language, prayer, dance and vocal and instrumental repertoires,” they said in a joint statement. “Yet no institutional framework has existed for the preservation, transmission and further creative development of this body of knowledge as a whole. It is this gap that Yiddish Summer and the Klezmer Institute are working to fill.”
Collaborating Institutions
Yiddish Summer Weimar evolved from a workshop given in Weimar in 1998 by the American New Jewish Music group Brave Old World. Under the direction of US-born musician and educator Dr. Alan Bern, it has since become one of the most important institutions of its kind internationally. YSW is organized by the Other Music Academy e.V., a Weimar-based non-profit organization founded in 2006 that supports cultural projects integrating the arts, scientific research, social action and education.
The Klezmer Institute was founded in the fall of 2018 to advance the study, preservation, and performance of Ashkenazic Jewish expressive culture through research, teaching, publishing and programming. The Institute seeks to increase communication and collaboration between professional and amateur musicians, dancers, and scholars throughout the world, and is a champion for Ashkenazic expressive culture 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.
For More Information
For related photos and graphics, please click here for the YSW flickr account where you will be able to download ready-to-publish materials with captions and copyright information.
For further information please contact Ben Niran at ben . niran at othermusicacademy dot eu
or use the contact form here
Support KMDMP
If you would like to make a monetary donation to the project, use the button here or visit the Klezmer Institue Support page. To receive updates about this project, subscribe to the KMDMP mailing list via on the project page.
