The Klezmer Archive

FAIN: HAA-277220-21

Klezmer Institute, Inc. (Yonkers, NY 10702-1175)
Christina Crowder (Project Director: June 2020 to October 2024)

A series of planning meetings to consider how to approach the technical challenges of developing a digital resource on klezmer music that will incorporate multilingual oral histories of klezmer musicians along with written scores.

The Klezmer Archive project aims to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music. The project will adapt and apply methodology from computational musicology and library sciences to create a tool to facilitate study of the klezmer corpus in a deeper, more systematic manner and on a more comprehensive scale than previously possible.

Associated Products

Klezmer Institute Digital Humanities Projects: Klezmer Archive Project & the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Klezmer Institute Digital Humanities Projects: Klezmer Archive Project & the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project
Author: Christina Crowder
Abstract: Abstract: In this paper we argue that both klezmer music and the Yiddish language are not simply historical artifacts, but the loci of thriving contemporary interest communities and that creating digital structures tailored to the needs of these communities is a clear imperative that matches the need to design for academic best practice in the digital humanities space. The Klezmer Archive Project and the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) present a unique opportunity to create digital spaces that support culture bearers, and to develop high-quality, authoritative resources for newcomers to the field. Both of these projects have been the unlikely beneficiaries of Coronavirus-related lockdowns in unexpected ways. The Klezmer Archive functions as a distributed team, and much of the communal work, exchange, learning, and events in the KMDMP take place in zoom rooms.
Date: 10/05/2021
Primary URL: https://klezmerinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/POLIN-2021-Whats-New-Whats-Next-conference-Paper-—-KMDMP-and-KA-FINAL-3-25-22.pdf
Primary URL Description: Download link for Conference paper, hosted on the Articles page for the Klezmer Institute website (klezmerinstitute.org/articles/.
Secondary URL: https://klezmerinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/POLIN-conf-slides-KA-and-kmdmp-FINAL-3-25-2022.pdf
Secondary URL Description: Powerpoint slides for this presentation
Conference Name: POLIN: What's New, What's Next?

What's Up With Kiselgof? A behind the scenes look at the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project and the Klezmer Archive Project. (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: What's Up With Kiselgof? A behind the scenes look at the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project and the Klezmer Archive Project.
Abstract: Presentation slides for an online public lecture for the Promiscuous World of Jewish Music online series hosted by Josh Horowitz.
Author: Christina Crowder
Date: 1/11/2021
Location: Online Zoom Presentation
Primary URL: https://klezmerinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Promiscuous-World-Slides-FINAL-1-11-21.pdf
Primary URL Description: Hosted space for the slide presentation used during this lecture.

Archiving Music Based in Oral Tradition: The Klezmer Archive Project (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Archiving Music Based in Oral Tradition: The Klezmer Archive Project
Author: Christina Crowder
Author: Clara Byom
Author: Eleonore Biezunski
Abstract: Documentation of music based in oral tradition is inherently complicated: unknown composers, inconsistent names, multiple versions, and overlapping genres stretch the limits of archival taxonomies. To address these issues, the Klezmer Archive Project is investigating ways to structure corpus-specific metadata and to build tools for curated user contributions within a flexible architecture, showing relationships between items, linking multiple recordings, tune variations, and shared melodic material and any other user-identified relationship artifact-to-artifact. This presentation will relay the project team's findings in its first year of work, including UX research with community members, music encoding considerations in the case study materials, and further thoughts on corpus-specific metadata ontologies for music based in oral tradition.
Date: 03/05/2022
Primary URL: http://conferences.blog.musiclibraryassoc.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2022/02/mla_2022_program_2.16.2022.pdf
Primary URL Description: Link to the conference proceedings (recordings and other resources not yet available)
Secondary URL: https://klezmerinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2022-MLA-Slides-FINAL-3-25-2022.pdf
Secondary URL Description: Upload link for Presentation slides hosted on Klezmer Institute Website.
Conference Name: MLA 2022 Virtual Conference

Klezmer Archive Community Meeting 2021 (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Klezmer Archive Community Meeting 2021
Abstract: Klezmer Archive Community Meeting — You’ve heard about the Klezmer Archive and now’s your chance to meet the team! Klezmer Institute held a Community Meeting about the Klezmer Archive Project on June 6, 2021. This is the video recording of this Zoom meeting.
Author: Christina Crowder
Author: Clara Byom
Author: Max Rothman
Author: Yonatan Malin
Author: Dan Kunda Thagard
Author: Matthew Stein
Author: Schyler Versteeg
Author: Eleonore Biezunski
Date: 06/06/2021
Location: Zoom / YouTube
Primary URL: https://youtu.be/geo9rD70sBo
Primary URL Description: YouTube link for this video

Klezmer Institute Awarded NEH DHAG Grant (Blog Post)
Title: Klezmer Institute Awarded NEH DHAG Grant
Author: Christina Crowder
Abstract: The Klezmer Institute is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a Phase I Digital Humanities Access Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2021-2022. The Klezmer Archive project aims to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music.
Date: 12/18/2020
Primary URL: https://klezmerinstitute.org/2020/12/18/klezmer-archive-receives-neh-dhag-award/
Primary URL Description: Klezmer Institute Home Page
Blog Title: Klezmer Institute awarded NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for Klezmer Archive Project.
Website: Klezmer Institute

Klezmer Archive Community Meeting (Blog Post)
Title: Klezmer Archive Community Meeting
Author: Christina Crowder
Abstract: Klezmer Institute invites you to a Community Meeting about the Klezmer Archive Project. Funded for a two-year, Phase 1 Digital Humanities Access Grant by the NEH, the Klezmer Archive project aims to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music.
Date: 06/04/2022
Primary URL: https://klezmerinstitute.org/2021/06/04/klezmer-archive-community-meeting/
Primary URL Description: Home page for the Klezmer Institutez
Blog Title: Klezmer Archive Community Meeting
Website: Klezmer Institute

Archiving Music Based in Oral Tradition: The Klezmer Archive Project (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Archiving Music Based in Oral Tradition: The Klezmer Archive Project
Author: Clara Byom
Author: Christina Crowder
Abstract: The Klezmer Archive Project — Documenting Culture Bearers and Human Networks in Traditional Music Communities Klezmer, the instrumental music of Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe, was and continues to be a transnational music based in oral tradition. For decades members of the klezmer community have dreamt of a centralized repository for klezmer tunes and their historical/ethnographic context, but creating such a resource within current archival structures leaves out a critical source of knowledge—klezmer culture bearers. These individuals have a deep understanding of repertoire, history, and folklore that is highly valued within the international klezmer community, but it is only available to the whole community when it is collected and organized. With this in mind, the Klezmer Archive project (KA) aims to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on available information about klezmer music. Like many folk/ethnic music communities, the international network of klezmer specialists includes musicians with a range of expertise but centers around culture-bearers who collect and share information through performance, teaching, documentation/field work, recordings, and publishing. One of the core goals of the KA project is documenting the networks of human contact through which cultural (musical) information is exchanged in ways that are not reflected by traditional metrics, such as quantity/location of performances, books published, or recording catalog (all of which have many well-worn paths for documentation). The Klezmer Archive project is adapting and extending the DoReMus ontology (itself a harmonization of CIDOC CRM and FRBRoo, extending classes and properties specific to musical data, and a set of shared multilingual vocabularies) to document human relationships. The “human relationship” concept allows people to be connected in the data in a way that more accurately reflects how cultural knowledge is exc
Date: 11/23/2022
Primary URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lcJA8WKo6v4YZ0XvDSTXDDRC2PqKGrPc/view?usp=sharing
Primary URL Description: link to google drive location of presentation slides PDF
Conference Name: DH Budapest 2022: Digital Humanities Conference November 23-25

Documenting Folklore in Digital Structures — The Fuzzy Genre Boundary Conundrum (Blog Post)
Title: Documenting Folklore in Digital Structures — The Fuzzy Genre Boundary Conundrum
Author: Christina Crowder
Abstract: How do we make sense of conflicting data to arrive at genre designations that resonate with historical practice? How do we account for overlapping or confusing genre classifications, especially when there may be more than one “correct” answer? How do we organize classifications and typologies in such a way that they are useful for search?
Date: 10/24/2022
Primary URL: https://blog.klezmerarchive.org/posts/documenting-folklore-in-digital-structures-the-fuzzy-genre-boundary-conundrum/
Blog Title: Documenting Folklore in Digital Structures — The Fuzzy Genre Boundary Conundrum
Website: https://blog.klezmerarchive.org/

Community Based Music Information Retrieval: A Case Study of Digitizing Historical Klezmer Manuscripts from Kyiv (Article)
Title: Community Based Music Information Retrieval: A Case Study of Digitizing Historical Klezmer Manuscripts from Kyiv
Author: Yonatan Malin
Author: Christina Crowder
Author: Clara Byom
Author: Daniel Shanahan
Abstract: In this article we provide a case study in the datafication of historical handwritten manuscripts, which diversifies the repertoire, approaches, demographics, and institutional partnerships of MIR. The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) is a community-based project to digitize music and text, teach, and make music from facsimiles of manuscripts held by the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. The corpus comprises 850 high-resolution photographs of handwritten music manuscripts and catalog pages, with a total of around 1,300 melodies. Much of the music was collected by pioneering Belarusian ethnographer Zusman Kiselgof among Jewish communities in the ‘Pale of Settlement’ (mostly in modern Ukraine and Belarus) during the An-Ski Expeditions of 1912–1914. The repertoire is mixed, combining typical Jewish dance and non-dance genres, European society and folklore dance music, and a relatively small quantity of songs and liturgical chant settings. The project simultaneously encodes music in formats accessible to computational musicology and enhances a creative musical community and deeply valued heritage. We introduce the project in dialogue with a recent article by Georgina Born on diversity in the field of MIR; present the material, issues for datafication, and results thus far; describe project elements that enhance musical community; demonstrate the diversity of participants with respect to age, gender, nationality, and profession; outline implications for MIR and computational ethnomusicology; and suggest new funding models and partnerships in support of cultural heritage documentation, preservation, continuity, and analysis.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://transactions.ismir.net/articles/10.5334/tismir.135
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval
Publisher: Ubiquity Press

Klezmer Archive Community Meeting (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Klezmer Archive Community Meeting
Abstract: This recording was made on June 12th, 2022 at the Klezmer Archive Project Update Community Meeting. The project is in Phase I of a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant.
Author: Klezmer Archive Team
Date: 06/12/2022
Location: Zoom
Primary URL: https://youtu.be/dvTHmidwCn0

Towards Documenting Human Relationships (Blog Post)
Title: Towards Documenting Human Relationships
Author: Clara Byom
Abstract: Developing a "Human Relationship Concept" in our ontology.
Date: 06/15/2022
Primary URL: https://blog.klezmerarchive.org/posts/towards-documenting-human-relationships/
Blog Title: Towards Documenting Human Relationships
Website: Klezmer Archive Project Blog

The Fuzzy Tune Boundaries Problem (Blog Post)
Title: The Fuzzy Tune Boundaries Problem
Author: Matthew Stein
Abstract: When considering how to accurately structure the dataset of klezmer music, we must answer a surprisingly complex question: how do we define a tune? And how do we best capture our diverse and often conflicting understandings of tunes into a clean, consistent data model?
Date: 06/10/2022
Primary URL: https://blog.klezmerarchive.org/posts/the-fuzzy-tune-boundaries-problem/
Blog Title: The Fuzzy Tune Boundaries Problem
Website: The Klezmer Archive Project Blog

Public Version—Klezmer Archive Project White Paper—NEH DHAG I (Report)
Title: Public Version—Klezmer Archive Project White Paper—NEH DHAG I
Author: Christina Crowder
Author: Clara Byom
Author: Eleonore Biezunski
Author: Schyler Versteeg
Author: Max Rothman
Author: Dan Kunda Thagard
Author: Matthew Stein
Author: Yonatan Malin
Abstract: 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. Outcomes from this phase include this white paper, a system architecture plan, a dev-blog, a landing page for the project, numerous public presentations, and a published journal article.
Date: 12/31/2022
Primary URL: https://klezmerinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/2023-Klezmer-Archive-DHAG-I-White-Paper-—-Final-8-4.pdf
Primary URL Description: Self-hosted website link at the Klezmer Institute website.
Access Model: open access, self-published
ISBN: n/a

The Archive as Network — KA Coffee Hour II (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: The Archive as Network — KA Coffee Hour II
Abstract: The Archive as Network: Topics from DH Budapest and the Association for Jewish studies conferences with commentary and discussion by Christina Crowder
Author: Christina Crowder
Date: 03/12/2023
Location: online/zoom
Primary URL: https://youtu.be/fCeU_4zHhQA
Primary URL Description: The Klezmer Archive playlist at the Klezmer Institute YouTube page.

Archiving Music of Oral Tradition — KA Coffee Hour I (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Archiving Music of Oral Tradition — KA Coffee Hour I
Abstract: Archiving Music of Oral Tradition, a presentation to the conference paper prepared for the Music Librarians Association in 2022 along with commentary and discussion with Christina Crowder and Clara Byom.
Author: Christina Crowder
Author: Clara Byom
Date: 02/16/2023
Location: online/zoom
Primary URL: https://youtu.be/cvfX78kaMzk
Primary URL Description: the Klezmer Archive playlist at the Klezmer Institute YouTube page.

Klezmer Archive GitHub (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Klezmer Archive GitHub
Author: Max Rothman
Author: Dan Kunda Thagard
Author: Matthew Stein
Abstract: This is the GitHub repository for the Klezmer Archive Project
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://github.com/klezmer-archive
Primary URL Description: The is the GitHub for the Klezmer Archive Project Team.
Access Model: open Access

Using Digital Humanities to Connect the Yiddish Archive to Contemporary Community: The Klezmer Archive Project (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Using Digital Humanities to Connect the Yiddish Archive to Contemporary Community: The Klezmer Archive Project
Author: Christina Crowder
Abstract: In the age of Digital Humanities, researchers are coming to rely on access to materials from the comfort of home. But what changes when we lose the direct connection between the archivists who work in physical spaces is severed from researchers working remotely? Can digital humanities projects for Yiddish Archives find ways to facilitate the sharing of knowledge that in the past was exchanged during in-person consultations with archivists and curators? This paper will introduce the Klezmer Archive Project and its ambition to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music. The paper will also contemplate preliminary ideas about how Yiddish cultural digital archive projects might think about creating structures to facilitate connections between archivists, researchers (and the Klezmer Archive case) musicians as intentional features. One of the most exciting elements of the Klezmer Archive Project is its goal to center the needs of musicians and culture bearers alongside those of researchers and scholars. Moving beyond the static taxonomies of traditional catalog systems, the tool will incorporate domain-specific metadata and linked open data to create a rich metadata set to facilitate text search. Incorporation of search “inside” musical items will facilitate computational and corpus studies research while at the same time addressing long-standing desires in the klezmer music community to trace the evolution of tunes and to keep track of multiple representations of melodies. This rich metadata will be curated by digital archivists on the klezmer archive team, but there is a real risk that both those curators—as well as archivists in institutions that the Klezmer Archive will seek to link to—will be separated from users by the “black box” of digital technology. This paper will summarize user experience interviews with current music archivists and librarians to understand how d
Date: 12/18/2022
Primary URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/108v9-AXN3UUtVLnhOLp6NEZ7hT51jmRh/view?usp=sharing
Primary URL Description: google drive link to Powerpoint slides for the Association of Jewish Studies Conference 2022.
Secondary URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13PmG-9BhjH1c7UFHAQMIoqjBumn6npkw37X-DNRTwYw/edit?usp=sharing
Secondary URL Description: Google Drive link to the Conference Paper for this presentation for the Association of Jewish Studies Conference.
Conference Name: Association for Jewish Studies Conference 2022

Radiant Others Podcast with the Klezmer Institute (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Radiant Others Podcast with the Klezmer Institute
Writer: Dan Blacksberg
Director: Dan Blacksberg
Producer: Beila Ungar
Abstract: How do you bring people in and get them invested in Ashkenazic Expressive Culture? The Klezmer Institute has a few ideas! In this episode I sit down with Klezmer Institute leaders Christina Crowder (her 2nd appearance on the Podcast!) and Clara Byom. They share stories about how this community fueled organization began, where they are now, and where they hope to take their work. We hear about pioneering digital strategies for making Yiddish culture come alive, and how they are doing it through collective translation and transcription work. I really like how they are engaging people across the world, giving them a place to gather on social media and elsewhere, and letting them have a voice in the whole process of the Institute’s work. It’s a wonderful bottom-up way of organizing and the results so far have been great. Find out more at https://klezmerinstitute.org/ Today’s music comes from tunes that people in the community have surfaced during the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digitization Project, where volunteers across the whole Yiddish world have transcribed and digitized hundreds and hundreds of songs to be a public resource. It’s an amazing project.
Date: 05/15/2023
Primary URL: https://radiant-others-a.blubrry.net/the-klezmer-institute/
Primary URL Description: Klezmer Institute Podcast page at the Radiant Others website.
Secondary URL: https://klezmerinstitute.org/2023/05/15/were-on-a-podcast-radiant-others-with-dan-blacksberg/
Secondary URL Description: Klezmer Institute webpage blog post about the podcast episode.
Access Model: open access
Format: Web

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