(JEWISH GROUP) How hundreds of forgotten klezmer tunes have been rescued from oblivion

More than one thousand klezmer tunes, some dating back to the late 19th Century, are being performed and recorded after sitting in a library in Kyiv for years, thanks to the nonprofit Klezmer Institute.

“This increases European klezmer music by fourfold over what was accessible before,” Christina Crowder, the New Haven-based accordion player who heads the institute, told me, adding that the collection ranges from virtuosic solo pieces to “workaday, regular old tunes.”

Digital photos of hundreds of pages of sheet music arrived on a memory stick at the Yiddish New York gathering in 2017, but the crowd-sourced effort to turn them into PDF files and share them on the web didn’t get going in earnest until late 2020. In the last couple of years, several albums featuring the resurrected klezmer tunes have been recorded. Crowder estimates that at least 72 musicians have digitized at least one tune for what has been dubbed the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP).

The project is working with a total of close to 1,400 tunes from two different sources: 26 notebooks of melodies collected by Zusman Kiselgof, a Russian folklorist who participated in the seminal An-ski ethnographic expeditions, and a 236-page manuscript by Avraham Yehoshua Makonovetsky, a Russian klezmer violinist who played at Jewish weddings. Both Kiselgof and Makonovetsky were Jews. The notebooks and the manuscript had been sitting in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.

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