Gramophone In Focus

An Interview Series With Discographers & Collectors
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Series 2: Cataloguing  Collecting, & Contextualizing Early Recorded Jewish Music

Gramophone recordings gave the modern klezmer community its earliest listen to the sound of twentieth century klezmer and Jewish music. To get to our ears, those discs were recorded onto cassette tapes and CDs and now they stream over bluetooth right into our wireless headphones—a succession of miracles of recorded sound technology. We wouldn’t have any of those sounds without the work of the collectors and discographers that we’re putting “In Focus” for this series. We’ll delve into the world of high-stakes Ebay auctions, serendipitous ephemera, chasing matrix numbers, and the utter joy of listening to improbably preserved shellac for the first time. Plus, we’ll explore the kinds of histories that can be uncovered through the careful reconstruction of recording sessions and follow the pathways of early record producers who collected the urban music that folklorists Brailoiou and Bartok scorned.

Register at the Eventbrite link for each speaker.
| Concession tickets as donation |
Standard  $10 |  Patron as $18

About the Series 

Join Klezmer Institute’s Christina Crowder to meet the people who have conducted some of the most important work in the documentation and collecting of early recordings of klezmer and other Jewish musics. Tune in live to ask your own questions and to participate in an intimate conversation about the day to day work of discographers and collectors  that puts a focus on the personal reflections and stories that aren’t visible in the spreadsheet tables of a record catalogue. 

Sunday, October 10 Paul Gifford  — Understanding the “Romanian” Orchestra phenomenon of the late 19th/early 20th century through ephemera & records

Sunday, October 24, Sherry Mayrent  — Building the Mayrent Collection.  

Sunday,  October 31, Michael Aylward — Creating the European Jewish Gramophone discography

Sunday, November 21, Jeffrey Wollock  — Audio Recordings as Historical Sources

Sunday, December 5,  Round Table Discussion

Series II Concluding Roundtable Discussion with Paul Gifford, Sherry Mayrent, Michael Aylward, Jeffrey Wollock, hosted by Christina Crowder.

Sunday, December 5, 2pm Eastern.

Register via Eventbrite here.

We conclude our series with a round table discussion with all of our folks from previous sessions. This will be an opportunity to take in a talk through what we’ve learned over the course of the series, and to take stock of “where we are” in understanding the history of early Jewish commercial recordings. 

Paul Gifford

Paul Gifford

October 10, 2pm eastern

Register to attend at Gifford Eventbrite here.

Short Bio

Paul Gifford is a writer, musician and collector. He began researching the hammered dulcimer when he began playing it more than 50 years ago.  In the late 1930s, his father, a Juilliard graduate, had been a customer of Lower East Side businessmen like cimbalom maker John Koleszar and secondhand instrument dealers the Blank Brothers.  Paul was an archivist at the University of Michigan-Flint for more than 30 years.  In preparing The Hammered Dulcimer: A History(Scarecrow Press, 2001), he collected old photographs with the instrument. This interest led to an exploration of the topic of the “Roumanian” Orchestra in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, which will be the topic of our “In Focus” discussion. 

http://www.giffordmusic.net/index.html

Selected Bibliography
Sherry Mayrent

Sherry Mayrent

October 24th, 2pm

Register to attend at Mayrent Eventbrite here

Short Bio

Sherry Mayrent earned a PhD in English from the University of Kent, Canterbury, England, and spent 12 years as a research associate at Harvard Medical School before attending her first KlezKamp in 1987. She transitioned to KlezKamp staff in 1995, and in 2001 she became the Associate Director of the program. During that period, she became clarinetist and musical director of the Wholesale Klezmer Band for 16 years.

Since 2006 Sherry has assembled what has become one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Yiddish and Hebrew 78rpm recordings, which she is having digitized and entrusting to the stewardship of the Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. At over 9,000 recordings and growing, it represents over 6,000 unique performances and spans the full gamut of genres commercially recorded from 1895-1955. The discs have all been fully catalogued with over half already meticulously transferred and digitally preserved by the Grammy-award winning sound engineer Christopher King.

Sherry is the founder of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at U Wisconsin, Madison, an outgrowth of her decades of involvement in the preservation and dissemination of Yiddish culture. She is a record producer and prolific composer of klezmer tunes in the traditional style. Her passion for traditional Yiddish culture is equaled only by her love of all things Hawaiian, and she serves on the board of the Mohala Hou Foundation. She divides her year between her home in Watertown, Massachusetts and her home on the Big Island of Hawaii.

https://klezmeracademy.com/

Selected Bibliography

 

Michael Aylward

Michael Aylward

October 31, 2pm (EST)

Reserve a spot in the Zoom Room at Aylward Eventbrite here.

Short Bio

Michael Aylward graduated in German from the University of Sussex and spent the next eight years working as a peddler, market-trader, lorry driver and hospital porter before succumbing to the false charms of the insurance industry in which he spent fifteen years as an inter-departmental manager before becoming an insurance translator. In 1994, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to preserve his sanity, he started work on a Discography of European Recordings of Jewish Music. He estimates that he has now documented about 15,000 recordings made between 1899 and 1956 and that this probably represents the bulk of the total output. He is now examining the options for making his findings readily accessible to the public. In recent years he and Julian Futter have produced three critically acclaimed CDs of historical recordings of Jewish music: Wandering Stars ‑ Songs From Gimpel’s Lemberg Yiddish Theatre 1906‑1910, Chekhov’s Band ‑ Eastern European Klezmer Music from the EMI Archives1908‑1913 and Warsaw’s Jewish Mermaid: Syrena Recordings from the Orvomaa Archive 1909‑1933. His non-insurance translations include: Revolution or Reform? A Confrontation [Herbert Marcuse in conversation with Karl Popper] and Beyond Recall A record of Jewish musical life in Nazi Berlin, 1933 ‑ 1938.

Selected Bibliography / Discography

Beyond Recall A record of Jewish musical life in Nazi Berlin, 1933 ‑ 1938, 11 CD box Set with 516-page hardcover book. Bear Family Records, 2000. (translations). 

Chekhov’s Band ‑ Eastern European Klezmer Music from the EMI Archives1908‑1913, Renair Records REN0129, YEAR. 

Early Recordings of Jewish Music in Poland,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 16, Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture in Poland and its afterlife, eds. Michael C. Steinlauf and Antony Polonsky (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003) p. 59-69. 

Gimpel’s Theatre, Lwów: The Sounds of a Popular Yiddish Theatre Preserved on Gramophone Records, 1904–1913″ in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 32,  eds. François Guesnet, Benjamin Matis, Antony Polonsky (Liverpool: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press, 2020), p. 125-146

Shir Hodu: Jewish Songs from Bombay of the ’30s, produced by Michael aylward & Julian Futter, Renair Records, REN0127, 2009.

Wandering Stars: Songs From Gimpel’s Lemberg Yiddish Theatre 1906‑1910, produced by Michael Aylward & Julian Futter, Renair Records REN0128, 2013.

Warsaw’s Jewish Mermaid: Syrena Recordings from the Orvomaa Archive 1909‑1933, produced by Michael Aylward & Julian Futter, Renair Records REN0130, YEAR. 

Jeffrey Wollock

Jeffrey Wollock

November , 21, 2pm (EST)

Reserve a spot in the Zoom Room at Wollock Eventbrite here.

Short Bio

Jeffrey Wollock, Ph.D., is an international authority on the history of the voice, speech, hearing, gesture and language sciences, is also well known as an exponent of the traditional klezmer violin style and a klezmer historian. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Wollock began violin at 7 and viola at 12; he also studied Yiddish at a school run by poet Chonon Kiel. He began collecting old Jewish 78s before his bar mitzvah, thanks to their frequent occurrence at local bazaars and curbsides and his father’s encouragement. After studying viola with Paul Doktor and earning a B.A. at Brooklyn College and an M.A. at Memorial University of Newfoundland (both in English literature), he attended the Yale School of Music, played in many orchestras and chamber groups in the United States and England, and in the late 1970s resumed viola studies with Emanuel Vardi. While freelancing he met Andy Statman, who encouraged him to learn the traditional Jewish violin style from close study of early recordings. In 1981 he received a doctorate in modern history from Oxford University and the following year he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for further study in Oxford, where he remained until mid-1986 and was very active in the musical scene. In the early 1990s Wollock got involved in the Yiddish language revival led by Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter and the klezmer revival through KlezKamp and Buffalo on the Roof. In 1993-94 he organized a series of dance workshops with live bands for the Learning Alliance, NYC, with Michael Alpert as instructor, and over the next decade worked and performed with Alpert and master clarinetist German Goldenshteyn, who had recently arrived from Ukraine. Wollock worked as a field researcher for CTMD’s Soviet Jewish Cultural Inititative (Nashi Traditsii) and performed in Di Molever Kompanye with Goldenshteyn and Hersh Rikelman. For the last 25 years Wollock has researched the history of klezmer music, making presentations and publishing a series of widely-cited studies on klezmer history and discography in both English and Yiddish. He taught courses in English and History at Long Island University and the College of New Rochelle, and his Introduction to Klezmer Music (2004 & 2006), in Performance Studies at Texas A&M University was perhaps the first full-credit university course entirely devoted to this subject.

Selected Bibliography / Discography

 “European Recordings of Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, 1911-1914.” ARSC Journal (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) 28.1 91997):36-55 

“Hemshekh (Continuity).” New Routes: Traditional Music and Dance in America, 6.2:6. Fall 1998.

“The Soviet Klezmer Orchestra.” East European Jewish Affairs 30.2 (2000):1-36.

“Fun kleinshtetldikn klezmer biz kontsert virtuoz” (From small-town Jewish wedding musician to concert virtuoso, in Yiddish) Di Tsukunft, 107.1 (August 2002),7-17.

— Part 2: 107.2/3 (November 2002), 23-27.

— Part 3: 107.4 (December 2002-April 2003), 25-29.

[English adaptation of part of “Fun kleinshtetldikn klezmer biz kontsert virtuoz,” part one, adapted by Gerald Stillman], “From Klezmer-Fiddler to Concert Violinist,” Jewish Currents  57, nr.1 (January-February 2003) 57 no.1, pp. 28-29, 37.

“Soviet Recordings of Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, 1937–1939.” ARSC Journal, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 14–32.

“Historic Records as Historical Records: Hersh Gross and His Boiberiker Kapelye (1927-1932).” ARSC Journal, vol. 38, no.1 (Spring 2007), 44-106. 

(With Joel Rubin). “Wandering Stars.” Pakn Treger, Magazine of the Yiddish Book Center, No.81 (Summer 2020), 28-37. (On the interplay of klezmer and classical careers across five generations of the Beckerman/Fishberg family from Ukraine.)

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