Christina Crowder was about to give a presentation in London on April 2 on the Klezmer Archive Project when her phone began buzzing and ringing incessantly. It was her colleague at the Klezmer Institute, close to tears.
Its grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supports the Klezmer Archive Project, had been terminated effective April 1.
“Our project just ended abruptly,” said Crowder, the Institute’s executive director, who was stuck with the ticket cost and lodging for the conference.
The Klezmer Institute is one of many organizations impacted by President Donald Trump’s recent terminations to more than 1,000 grants from the NEH. The $57,000 in federal funding taken from the Klezmer Institute will be repurposed “in a new direction in furtherance of President Trump’s agenda,” an April 2 letter read.
Without institutional support outside the NEH, Crowder and her colleagues plan to continue archiving klezmer music, but at a slower pace and on a longer timeline, primarily through volunteer efforts from the institute’s core team members.
The Klezmer Archive Project
Klezmer music is an instrumental musical tradition once performed in the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Eastern Europe at celebrations. According to the NEH, the genre is known for its “danceable beats and improvisational style.”
After the Holocaust decimated Jewish life in Eastern Europe and klezmer music declined in popularity in the United States, the genre was revitalized in the late 1970s.
“Klezmer music is the heritage of the Jewish people,” Crowder said. “This is our heritage and by many, many miracles, it survived.”
Crowder and the Klezmer Institute are working to create a universally accessible digital archival tool so that users can interact, discover and research information about klezmer music and its history. The first phase involved digitizing the manuscripts. But the process of creating this “database” isn’t so simple.
“Existing bibliographic and archival tools are not well suited to documenting folk culture or heritage culture,” Crowder said.
Bibliographic tools might document the composer’s name and date of the recording, whereas archival descriptions focus on describing objects. Crowder said what members of the Klezmer Institute want to document is much more than solely the name of a song.
“We want to actually document the music inside of the melody, to surround it with the kind of rich contextual information that you need to be able to make sense of it,” she said. “Another example I can give is if you can imagine that every song by the Beatles was just called ‘Song.’”
It’s a similar phenomenon in the klezmer world, where thousands of tunes are titled “Freilach,” Yiddish for “a cheerful tune.” In order to distinguish one “Freilach” from the thousands of others, klezmer archivists document the song’s location of origin, source, date, number of measures and key, as well as compare the first few measures of the song with other pieces.
“It’s a really interesting problem that hasn’t been solved yet by traditional cataloguing systems [and] existing tools,” Crowder said. “It’s really hard because you don’t want to build everything from scratch.”
The NEH Phase II grant that was terminated in early April would have in part allowed project members to share their prototyping of the archival tool and testing work with the community.
“At this moment, we don’t have many words to express our sorrow and anger, but we do have explicit, actionable requests,” an April 3 email from the Klezmer Institute read.
The email implored readers to donate to the Klezmer Institute’s emergency fundraiser, share the email with their networks and call their elected officials to discuss the impact of cutting humanities funding.
DC Klezmer Workshop
Saddened to receive the email announcing the terminated grant, Washington, D.C., klezmer artists immediately shared the message with hundreds of friends and online connections and posted on Facebook to request donations.
Howard Ungar, the founder of the DC Klezmer Workshop, wrote a check to the Klezmer Institute due to his longtime appreciation for the art. He is a regular donor to the organization, but felt that the institute needed monetary support now.
Ungar, who plays the trumpet in a klezmer band, is one of the musicians affected by the loss of the NEH grant.
“I can get some of [the music online], but it’s harder to access,” he said. “I think the ability to use that material will be enhanced by [the Klezmer Institute’s] ability to finish the product [and] get the material published in a way that’s accessible to the public.”
Judy Barlas, a musician and member of the DC Klezmer Workshop, added that making klezmer accessible will also make the underrepresented genre available to researchers.
“That’s really important because I think there will be more respect for the music when it’s also in the academic realm,” Barlas said.
She noted the unique challenges associated with trying to develop a tune from written music.
“In Wales, the tradition [of playing traditional Welch music] was totally killed by the church and they weren’t allowed to play the music anymore,” Barlas said. “During the Folk Revival movement of the early 1900s, they found the manuscripts and started playing it. They had no oral tradition whatsoever of how this stuff sounded. They ended up making it sound like Irish music, which continued in England, but they had to completely re-create it.”
She added that today’s klezmer artists have “some sense of” what the traditional music sounds like, sans the different musicians’ individual styles that have been lost over time.
“There’s a lot of research that can be done, and with a searchable archive, people can do it and that will give it more respect,” Barlas said.
Barlas and Ungar plan to join forces with the Baltimore klezmer community for a fundraising event in the near future, hoping to support the Klezmer Institute’s effort.
Why bring back this historically underrepresented genre enjoyed by a seemingly small subsection of the population? “Because it’s ours,” Barlas said.
“It informs who we are today,” Ungar added.
