The project infrastructure was created to support its guiding principles:

• Make the materials accessible to all at no cost
• Make the barrier for participation as low as possible
• Make any digital outputs created by the community available as quickly as possible
• Practice open-source principles and reinforce source attribution

As a result of these founding principles, the source material has being released in its entirety, without editorial intervention as the first step of the project. While the digital notations and translations will be made available at a later date, the PDF files of contributed digital notations are made available as soon as they are uploaded.   

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 copy high-quality photographs of the pages of several notebooks housed in Archive #190.

The project team will be involved in editing and curating incoming transcriptions and translations, musicological analysis of the tunes, development and updating of online access to the tunes, and the preparation of KMDMP-initiated scholarly editions and player folios.

Eléonore Biezunski, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Clara Byom, Klezmer Institute
Christina Crowder, Klezmer Institute
Walter Zev Feldman, NYU Abu Dhabi, Klezmer Institute
Chitoshi Hinoue, Kyoto University of Art and Design
Daniel Kunda Thagard
Yonatan Malin, University of Colorado, Boulder
Mariko Mishiro, Tokyo University of Arts
Anna Rogers (Gladkova), University of Copenhagen
Max Rothman
Pete Rushefsky, Center for Traditional Music & Dance (CTMD)
Lyudmila Sholokhova, New York Public Library
Mark Slobin, emeritus Wesleyan University
Matthew Stein
Schyler VerSteeg

Phase I: Dissemination
Share the Kiselgof notebooks and the Makonvetsky Wedding Book in PDF form. PDF reproductions of each notebook, referred to using the Yiddish term “Heft,”  are hosted for download on this page. The PDFs are shared under the Creative Commons CC-BY License that requires any derivative work to include attribution to the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine Institute of Manuscripts. Each PDF has a two-page cover that describes the project and points to the project web page.

Phase II: Digitize & Translate

Musicians and scholars from around the world are invited to digitally engrave (notate) the hand-written music from the original notebooks into a digital music .xml format through the music notation software of your choice. Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian speakers are invited to transliterate and translate the hand-written notes and marginalia into English, Ukrainian, Russian, and other languages. We hope that those inspired to work with this treasure trove of material will pay it forward by sharing some of the basic transcription and translation work back with the KMDMP Project. Both the  digitized music and notes will be made available via a simple website, and a lightly edited version of the music .xml will be made available via a github repository.

Phase 2 will evolve through a process of discovery and iteration between participants and active team members. While all materials developed during the project will be made publicly available, volunteers who contribute music notation and translations will have access to project chat channels, can post and edit comments about individual tunes, and will have the option to be considered for the editorial team as the project develops. Volunteers will also have their names included in the project website and will receive a special discount on any scholarly or player editions published through the project.    

Phase III: Analyze, Perform & Transform

Our hope is that digitizing this corpus of tunes will create a musical and text data set that can be used by musicologists, linguists, and historians across many disciplines, as well as by musicians and anyone interested in the Jewish music of early twentieth century Ukraine and Belarus. The material made available through this project will also form a test corpus for an ambitious archival and computational musicology project provisionally called The Klezmer Archive. For musicologists, the breadth of material available both by tune type and in the distribution of informants across geographical regions provides the potential for deep analysis and comparison. For musicians, access to previously unknown tunes and alternate versions of known melodies has the potential to inspire new creativity and artistic expression. 

Artists and scholars are encouraged to use this material to inspire their own creative and scholarly inclinations!  Please make sure to simply credit the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine Institute of Manuscripts as required by the Creative Commons CC-BY License (See Copyrights & Permissions), and please send a copy of your derivative work to the library as described below. 

The KMDMP Project thanks the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine for permission to share this precious historic resource. The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Project has received financial support from the Center for Traditional Music & Dance. Ongoing administrative and grant writing support is provided by the Klezmer Institute.

We are grateful for the countless hours of meticulous work contributed by the hundreds of volunteers who have donated their time and expertise to the work of the project. We are delighted beyond measure to hear this music being played by klezmer enthsiasts around the world.

The KMDMP corpus is in three parts:

1. 1. 26 non-consecutive numbered notebooks (heftn) with handwritten music from various klezmer sources collected by Kiselgof during the An-ski Expeditions (“Kiselgof”); 
   2. Moshe Bergovski’s catalog of this material (Beregovski Catalog); and,
   3. A 236 page music manuscript prepared for Moshe Beregovski by A.E. Makonovetsky ca. 1938 (“Makonovetsky”). 

Between the Kiselgof notebooks and the Makonovetsky manuscript, the musical corpus covers approximately 1,400 melodies, the vast majority of which are instrumental tunes with a small but significant number of songs, niggunim, and liturgical pieces.

The music contains a mix of genre types from across the spectrum of the repertoire of a professional klezmer musician during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The notations range from simple two-part “AA BB” dance tunes to multi-page solo show pieces with known composers (e.g. KMDMP 16-51-1438, the concert piece “Di Liulie”  attributed to Avram-Moyshe Kholodenko “Pedutser” which encompases eight engraved pages and includes an accompaniment line). The corpus contains many non-metric pieces for both voice (liturgical pieces) and violin (ritual wedding genres such as kale bazetsn & mazel tov).  

Beregovski Catalogue Pages

The catalogue PDF contains images of the handwritten catalogue in Yiddish made by Moshe Beregovski as he worked with the Kiselgof material. Readers will find categories for catalogue number, name of song or melody, informant, location, and heft/recording reference.

Kiselgof Heft PDFs

The project team has made a conscious decision to release the notebooks with a bare minimum of additional information and no up-front curation or editing. The PDF files available in the download folder have been saved in a high-quality “preservation copy” at 300 DPI with a page size of 14.25 x 9.5″, and as an “access copy” at significantly smaller file size, but with lower image resolution. The Preservation file folder is approximately 5 gigabytes in size, and the Access file folder is about 350 MB in size.

Each PDF has a two- or three-page cover that contains a brief description of the project, copyright and attribution information, contact links and other project information. In addition, the “Heft Cover” includes a “worksheet” space for each catalogue item in that heft  with selected tune titles and informant information. This basic information was translated by Walter Zev Feldman as he was working with Anna Rogers during the acquisition period in the summer of 2017. Not all tune names or informant names are included—filling in those blanks is the very work of the project.

You can access a comprehensive set of resources and tools for participating in the project by registering via the button below, including transcription guidelines, tips and tricks, project-wide tracking sheets, invitations to discussion groups and a visual glossary of handwritten music symbols.

As an overarching principle, the goal for digitizing music notation is to preserve as much detail as possible in the transformation of the visual information found on each page into the digital code that computers understand.

In a practical sense, this means attempting to make note of specific instances where what you see on the page can’t be directly copied in the digital space. For example, the notation program you’re using might not allow you to recreate certain stem directions, or to make repeats out of partial-measure phrases. In those instances, we simply ask that you make a note of the choice you made as a transcriptionist and why.

Likewise, Yiddish spellings will eventually be standardized to YIVO orthography for printed publications, but it is important to document idiosyncracies and alternate spelling that are encountered as part of the digital transcription process.

The high-resolution scans of the original documents were produced by the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine and are shared by gracious permission of the Library for use by scholars and musicians wishing to research and perform the music. The original photographs contained herein are not authorized for commercial distribution. However, derivative work, including the digitally engraved music and notes created during this project are governed by the Creative Commons CC-BY License, under which you may share and adapt for any purpose derivative work of the music contained in these files as long as attribution is given to the Institute of Manuscripts of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine with a link to the CC-BY license page: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The library further requests that authors of any derivative work (academic or commercial) send a copy to:
Institute of Manuscripts, Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, Volodymyrska str. 62, bld.2, Kyiv, Ukraine, 01033 or to the main building: Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, Holosiivskyi Ave, bld. 3, Kyiv, Ukraine, 03039

The material digitized for this project includes 26 notebooks of musical notation collected by Zusman Kiselgof (Zinovy Kiselgoff). The notebooks are housed in Archive #190 and also include the Makonovetsky Wedding Music Manuscript, which was a key source for Moshe Beregovski and his seminal Jewish Instrumental Folk Music collection. Archive #190 also includes a vast collection of other materials collected by Kiselgof, including 11 folders of folk song lyrics (Folders 187 through 197, over 700 pages), and Folder 198 containing mainly sheet music for songs (741 pages). There are also other (non-Kiselgof) manuscripts of Jewish music in Folders 132-136, 138, & 148.

In addition to the materials at the Institute of Manuscripts, the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine also has a dedicated Judaica archive. It contains an extensive collection of printed materials and it boasts the world’s largest repository of Jewish traditional music recorded on Edison wax cylinders, including materials collected by Kiselgof. Credentialed researchers can access additional manuscripts by providing a letter of request from their home institution. Copying fees apply for digitization.

Digitization of these collections are an ongoing project that depends on the sales of CDs. As of 2022, 13 volumes have been produced and are available for purchase at the Institute for Information Recording of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. 

For more information: contact Tetyana Batanova at:  Judaica-department at nbuv dot gov dot ua, or, irnbuv at gmail dot com, or library at nbuv dot gov dot ua

Read more about the Vernadsky national Library of Ukraine and its collections at these links.

http://www.audio.ipri.kiev.ua/about.html

http://www.archives.gov.ua/

We do not have additional archival information about individual informants beyond what is noted in Beregovski’s catalogue. Look to some of these sources for additional information.

There is a rich biographical essay about Makonovetsky and a short chapter on Klezmorim in the nineteenth century in Beregovski’s Jewish Instrumental Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski. The most current edition of this volume in English can be purchased at muziker.org

Old Jewish Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), edited and translated by Mark Slobin, includes Beregovski’s own writings about Jewish folk music.

Part one of Walter Zev Feldman’s Klezmer: Music, History, & Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) has a great deal of information about the klezmer profession in general.

Daniel Carkner has curated Wikipedia articles on a number of key figures that appear in the manuscripts. 

Avraham-Yehoshua Makonovetsky

Pedotser (Avram-Moyshe Kholodenko)

Asia Fruman has translated a key 1904  article by Ivan Lipaev titled “Jewish Orchestras,” which can be found on the Articles Page. 

The YIVO Encyclopedia has an excellent article that you can find here.

Tracing An-Sky: Jewish collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg is essentially an exhibition catalogue for a traveling exhibition of the same title that was jointly organized by The State Ethnographic Museum and the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam and was shown in the Netherlands, Cologne, Frankfurt, Jerusalem, and New York.

ShtetlRoutes.eu has a deeply researched, photo-rich essay on its website here, intended to accompany a driving tour of the main townships visited by the Expeditions.