A universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on available information about klezmer music
Visit the Klezmer Archive Project Dev-Blog
Read the Phase I White Paper Here
About 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. Tooling and frameworks developed for the Klezmer Archive project will be available for heritage communities to adapt for their own domain-specific uses, and will be particularly useful for the preservation and study of intangible cultural heritage.
The project team is exploring newly-available open source knowledge engine technologies for organizing and validating heritage-based information, and is the first team to explore use of these tools in the Digital Humanities. The KA team is also one of the first (to our knowledge) to experiment with modeling music data directly in a knowledge graph.
The Klezmer Archive Project (KA) has completed a period of research and development supported by a two-year Phase I NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from 2021- 2022. The primary goal of this phase was to produce a MVP (minimum viable product) plan identifying the core technical elements that must be integrated together to achieve the tool that could be called the Klezmer Archive as described in the project scope.
Klezmer Archive Project awarded $150,000 Phase II NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant – 2023-2025
Klezmer Institute Awarded Phase II NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant
for the Klezmer Archive Project 2023-2025
Newcomer Jewish culture nonprofit awarded third NEH grant in four years.
Klezmer Archive Project awarded $50,000 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant – 2021-2022
The Klezmer Institute was awarded a Phase I Digital Humanities Access Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2021-2022. The public White Paper from this grant will be made available on the Klezmer Archive Blog in August 2023. It describes the outcomes of the Phase I grant, including a system architecture (MVP) plan. The Klezmer Archive team is seeking funding and partnerships to pursue the next phase of the project—prototyping and testing of the components and tools described in the MVP plan.
This resource will bridge the gap between oral history and archives by being a space where heritage practitioners and community members can engage with archival items and one another as musicians do—by drawing connections between tunes, discussing genre classifications, searching for unnamed melodies, and comparing recorded versions of the same tune—while maintaining quality standards on par with institutional collections. The project is creating a novel resource that combines attributes of both institutional archive structures and community-based collections and that integrates computational music analysis tools to facilitate further study.
“For cultural communities that are interested in maintaining continuity with the past within a living tradition, the ability to capture the accumulated knowledge of current practitioners as well as documentation made in the past is an important potential tool.”
Klezmer Archive Community Meetings — 2021 & 2022
You’ve heard about the Klezmer Archive and now’s your chance to meet the team!
Klezmer Institute hosted two Community Meeting about the Klezmer Archive Project. The first was on June 6, 2021. The second was on June 12, 2022. Watch them both at the Klezmer Institute YouTube page.
“As a music theorist whose interests lie in computational and empirical methods, I am excited by the fact that an oral tradition such as Klezmer music … could be made available for future researchers and students to explore. This will change the conversations we have about how tonality, folk music, improvised music, and oral traditions work in music, and is an astonishingly important project ….”
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
Project support is also provided by Infoloom through use of their Networker tool. The Networker is a cloud-based platform to connect data and curate data coming from multiple, diverse sources. It can also be used as a standalone, brainstorming application.
Project Team
Christina Crowder, Klezmer Institute (Project Director)
Clara Byom, Klezmer Institute (Project Coordinator, Grant Administrator)
Eléonore Biezunski, Sound Archivist at The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Dan Kunda Thagard, Independent Software Developer
Yonatan Malin, Associate Professor in the College of Music and Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado – Boulder
Max Rothman, Freelance Senior Software Engineer
Andrew Parisi, Mathemetician, Ontologist, Logician
Matthew Stein, Designer at Enigmida and Independent Computational Musicologist and Software Engineer
Schyler VerSteeg, Product and UX Researcher at CVS Health
“This will be a huge advance in recognition and visibility for eastern European Jewish music studies within our circle and out to the larger world.”
Project Advisors
Jeanette Casey, M.M., M.L.S. – Music Librarian at Mills Music Library at UW-Madison Libraries
Jean Delahousse – Independent Semantic Web Consultant and Analyst
Emese Ilyefalvi, Ph.D. – Assistant Professor of Folkloristics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary and research fellow at MTA–ELTE Lendület Historical Folkloristics Research Group
Mark Kligman, Ph.D. – Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at University of California – Los Angeles
David Lewis – Researcher at University of Oxford e-Research Centre in Oxford and Lecturer in Computer Science at Goldsmiths, University of London
Judith Pinnolis, M.M, M.S. – Associate Director, Instruction and Engagement at Berklee College of Music/ The Boston Conservatory at Berklee
Pete Rushefsky – Executive Director at Center for Traditional Music and Dance
Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Siegel – Research Librarian at New York Public Library
Lyudmila Sholokhova, Ph.D. – Curator of the Dorot Jewish Collection at The New York Public Library
*Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”
