The Klezmer Archive Project

You are cordially invited to the Spring 2021

International Kiselgof Community Mini-Digitizathon

April 25, 2021 — 11am-7pm EDT

All the fun of the January event in 8 short hours!

All The Fun of the January Event in 8 Short Hours!

This event is free, but register for the KMDMP Commons to get access to the Zoom links, final schedule, and all of the resources shared by project participants.

Join the KMDMP Commons

Everyone is welocme to join our community of musicians and language specialists. Fill out a simple registration form to get access to the “KMDMP Commons,” a set of resources to track who’s working on what, ask for help with music notation and translation questions, and to share with each other.

The Deets

Sunday, April 25
8am – 4pm PDT | 11am-7pm EDT | 4pm-midnight GMT | 5pm-1am CET | 6pm-2am MST

Featured Discussant: Anna Rogers
Sessions on: Translation/Transliteration | Liturgical Music | Makonovetsky Violin Pieces | & Lots more!

Find the Draft Schedule Here

What: The Digitizathon is an approximately 8 hour virtual gathering of musicians, linguists, scholars, and enthusiasts who are working to digitally notate and translate the newly released Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Manuscripts. Participants will be able to join an open discussion room or join a feature session on a specific topic. Orientation sessions for newcomers will be held before and during the event.

Where: On Zoom. Throughout the day two discussion rooms will be available – one focussed mostly on music digitization topics, and the other on translation/transliteration questions. The day will kick off with an orientation pre-session, and featured discussion with Anna Rogers.

When: Sunday, April 25 8am-4pm PDT | 11am-7pm EDT | 4pm-midnight GMT | 5pm-1am CET | 6pm-2am MST

Who: You! Plus, musicians, linguists, scholars, and klezmer music enthusiasts from around the world! A who’s who of experts in klezmer music and Yiddish culture will host in open discussion rooms and feature sessions.

What is the Project? The Manuscripts being studied are comprised of Jewish instrumental folk melodies collected by the Belarusian Jewish ethnographer Zusman Kiselgof (Zinovy Kiselgoff) during the An-ski field expeditions conducted between 1912-1914 in the Pale of Jewish Settlement (mostly modern Ukraine and Belarus). This project is run entirely by volunteers who contribute their time and expertise to digitize the material for further research, study, and performance. For more information about the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project, visit www.klezmerinstitute.org/kmdmp.

How to Register: Register to participate via the form link below. Registrants will will be given access to a variety of documents in the “KMDMP Commons” and the links for the event! If you have any questions, please contact us here.

Participant Registration Form

Provisional Schedule

“The klezmorim interviewed by Kiselgof were professionals, with an eclectic collection of different tunes in their repertoire that let them earn a living, generation after generation, adapting to the new tastes and audiences. Their voices faded through numerous social cataclysms – but luckily, the archive survived. While these materials are very important for research, their biggest impact is going to be when they return to fingers of the musicians and the feet of the dancers, when they continue their journey through human hearts. Luckily, we discovered this time capsule at a post-revival time, when there is a generation of new klezmorim more than capable of processing and reviving this repertoire. The communities of Yiddish Summer Weimar, Yiddish New York, Klez Kanada, etc. are the real heirs of those who contributed to the archive in the first place. Why not pass them their inheritance, and let them develop it further – while helping to create a curated academic edition?”

Anna Rogers

KMDMP Project Team, University of Copenhagen

Support

Registration for this event is offered free of charge, and all project participants and administrators are volunteers. Donations to the KMDMP fund at the Klezmer Institute will support the admninstration time necessary to put on this and future events. If you or someone you know would like to make a financial contribution, you can donate via PayPal below, or visit the Klezmer Institute Support page.

Donate Via PayPal

What does the digitization work look like??

From this ….

To this ….

From this ….

To this ….

Why is it useful to digitize this music??

Transforming the hand-written notation into a digital format helps to make the music contained in the notebooks accessible to wider audiences and facilitates performance and study of the material. The digitized notation and text will also become a “test corpus” for the Klezmer Archive Project.