KMDMP Project Awarded
NEH Scholarly Editions Grant 2022-2024
The two-year NEH Scholarly Editions grant will develop a plan for a Critical Edition series based on the 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. Development of the series 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.
About the KMDMP Scholarly Editions Project
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.
The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Critical Editions will make available music manuscripts that will broaden the range of accessible resources, recenter 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 genre and style representative of the repertoires encapsulated in the manuscripts. Development and production of the volumes will be a collaborative effort between the project scholars and the most active and 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.
Project Team
Dr. Walter Zev Feldman (NY), Klezmer Institute — Project Director
Christina Crowder (CT), Klezmer Institute — Managing Editor
Dr. Helen Beer (UK) University College London, Jewish Music Institute —Collaborating Scholar
Dr. Asya Vaisman Schulman (MA) National Yiddish Book Center — Collaborating Scholar
Clara Byom (NM) Klezmer Institute — Project Coordinator
Text Editorial Team
Dr. Helen Beer (UK)
Dr. Asya Vaisman Schulman (MA)
Hannah Ochner (DE), KMDMP
Reuven Zaslavsky (NY), KMDMP
Music Editorial Team
Dr. Walter Zev Feldman (NY)
Christina Crowder
Daniel Carkner (CA), KMDMP
Alicia Svigals (NY), KMDMP
Patrick Farrell (DE), KMDMP
Hannah Ochner (DE), KMDMP
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. Dr. Feldman will lead the music editorial team, which will curate a series of planned volumes that will re-center the repertoires of key klezmer musician informants and contextualize the work of Europe’s revered twentieth-century Jewish ethnomusicological researchers. The volumes will present material across a range of klezmer, liturgical, Hasidic, and non-Jewish genre and style.
Dr. Beer and Dr. Vaisman Schulman will lead the language editorial team, which will develop ways to standardize Yiddish dialect transliteration, present dialect alongside the YIVO standardized Yiddish, and facilitate the understanding of old handwritten Yiddish and dialects. Russian and Ukrainian are found throughout the manuscripts, presenting unique issues such as pre-revolutionary orthography, abbreviations, misspellings, local words, 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.
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.”
