Playing Kiselgof: Rediscovering the Lost Klezmer Music of Ukraine
Klezmer Music Workshop with Christina Crowder

A chance encounter in Tokyo a few years ago led to the unlikely release of thousands of unique musical manuscripts in a Kyiv archive previously unavailable to contemporary klezmer musicians and scholars. The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project is an international digital humanities project connecting musicians today with the musical life of working klezmer musicians from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This class will introduce some of the most popular tunes to emerge from the corpus and will be a chance to explore klezmer music that has a different vibe from the American klezmer most of us are familiar with.

Tunes will be taught primarily by ear, but sheet music will be available for those who would feel more comfortable using it during the session, and for anyone who likes to take home.

All ages and instruments welcome. Workshop limited to 12 attendees.

Suggested workshop fee $25, no one turned away for lack of funds.

Christina Crowder has been performing and researching Jewish music for nearly thirty years, beginning in Budapest, Hungary in 1993 as a founding member of Di Naye Kapelye, and continuing with a Fulbright grant to Romania to document Jewish music in 1999, and since 2002 with an active research, teaching, and performing career in the US. She is Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute, which has been awarded two NEH Grants for Institute projects (2021-2024). Current projects include compilation of a folio of Jewish-adjacent Moldavian music, and publication of selected field recordings from the Fulbright grant period. Christina lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and performs with her klezmer quartet Bivolița. She also performs regularly with Michael Winograd and the Honorable Mentschen, the Dave Levitt Klezmer Trio and many others. She has been a guest instructor in klezmer accordion and ensemble performance in the US, Canada, and Europe, and was both musical director and performer in the 2019 Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the 2020 ART Portland productions of the Broadway play “Indecent.”