About The Klezmer Institute
Connecting Practitioners & Scholars
The 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.
As a research hub we connect scholars in many disciplines. Our projects seek to center practitioners as active participants in research activites alongside scholars and archivists, and to provide resources for instrumentalists, singers, and dancers who are deeply invested in Ashkenazic expressive culture, but don’t have academic institutional affiliations.
Defining Ashkenazic Expressive Culture
Our name is inspired by the klezmer revival, an ongoing creative engagement with the unique musical heritage of the Jews of Eastern Europe that today includes dance, song, and Hasidic repertoire under a broad umbrella of performance and study.
Why Ashkenazic Expressive Culture?
Defining expressive culture in this context is a way to understand these forms as non-textual artistic expression, and to observe the overarching unity connecting Yiddish language and speech gesture; the sung Hebrew/Aramaic of liturgical prayer; communicative and competitive dance forms; and the gesture and movement of vocal and instrumental repertoires.
Though deeply entwined with Jewish religious practice, Ashkenazic expressive culture reflects a secular expression of Jewish culture that resonates deeply for many people.
Who We Are
Our team includes one of the founders of the klezmer revival who has been a leading practitioner and scholar in Ashkenazic expressive culture topics since the 1970s. This wisdom and experience is supported by an admin team that has an extremely broad skill set in nonprofit management and who are themselves practitioners and researchers in klezmer music and dance. As an intergenerational collaborative team, we are able to work together to achieve a high level of quality and innovation.
How We Work
Klezmer Institute projects use digital humanities tools to define and document this legacy, and to increase communication and collaboration between professional and amateur musicians, dancers, and scholars throughout the world. Though deeply entwined with Jewish religious practice, Ashkenazic expressive culture reflects a secular expression of Jewish culture that resonates deeply for many people.
Our distributed team structure gives us an in-house model to bring the international community together through digital gatherings and that helps us bring programming to interested communities that are otherwise underserved. Our teams are capitalizing on rapid developments in Digital Humanities and to contribute to open source technology ecosystems and to realize longstanding dreams from our community such as a comprehensive database for klezmer tunes.
Ongoing Projects
Klezmer Institute supports two digital humanities projects, the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP), and the Klezmer Archive Project. Both of these projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are developing an extensive set of resources, including hard-to-find articles about Ashkenazic Expressive Culture topics on our Articles page. Our programming includes an anual online “In Focus” series, and in 2023 will move forward with in-person prgramming in North America and Europe.
Publishing
We’re delighted to announce publication of the Levitt Legacy Klezmer Folio vol. 1, which is a collection of 23 tunes and songs from the Levitt klezmer family of New York. Two other publications are in the works: a collection of mid-century American klezmer tunes edited by Clara Byom, and a collection of Moldavian Jewish and Jewish-adjacent tunes edited by Christina Crowder. More klezmer books and folios are in the works for 2021 and beyond.
Klezmer Archive Project
For decades members of the klezmer community have dreamt of a centralized repository for klezmer tunes and their historical/ethnographic context, but creating such a resource within current archival structures leaves out a critical source of knowledge—klezmer culture bearers. These individuals have a deep understanding of repertoire, history, and folklore that is highly valued within the international klezmer community, but it is only available to the whole community when it is collected and organized. With this in mind, the Klezmer Archive project aims to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music.
Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project
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.
