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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. Virtually. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Director of public programs of YIVO. We're very thrilled to be celebrating 40 years of our sound archive with a really amazing group of folks up here on this panel. Before we get started, I'll just say a very brief word about Yivo. Yivo is a very special place for the celebration and contemplation of Jewish history and Jewish culture. We have an archives in a Library with over 23 million documents and objects, including many sound archives, objects and recordings that you're going to hear about today, and over 400,000 books. We have a variety of public programs, classes, exhibitions that bring to life this world for a broad audience. And thank you again for joining us. Without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Hank Isnetsky, who will be leading today's conversation. Thank you.
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C
Thank you so much, Alex. So I am so delighted to be part of this conversation today. The people who are assembled here are not. Not just incredible resources for this sound archive, but all four are really major activists in the whole resurgence of Jewish music and the whole Jewish art scene as we know it now. So I would just want to mention our panelists, Henry Zaposnik, who had a long career in music. D4. Yeah. I don't have any idea what direction they're in on the screen. I'm sorry, but you did wave. Wave when I mentioned your name.
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D
Yeah, it's not.
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E
Why not?
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D
I'm just. Just doing it to you.
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C
That's great. So Henry had had a long career already in music. He had also been an activist, working with CETA on klezmer playing, forming a band under their auspices.
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A
He.
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C
He had worked with the Martin Steinberg center and, you know, came to Yivo to really start this sound archive. So it's amazing, an amazing thing, and really a miracle. Second, we have Jenny Romaine, who was the next person who helped Henry, worked right alongside Henry in running the sound archive. And Jenny came to this as a puppeteer, as a person involved in theater and in really kind of recontextualizing Jewish history in plays that she wrote that are incredibly brilliant. But this day job, of course, accompanied all that. And she came to Yivo through Barbara Kirshenbach Gimlet. Lawrence Glenberg was working, who I'm sure you all know as the lead singer of the cosmetics and in many other musical roles. And Lauren was working at Yivo, was working with clezcamp, and came to this from that association. And then Lauren needed someone to mind the store, maybe when he wasn't there, or maybe when he was there. And so we have Eleanor, who has written a book actually in French, about the Yivo sound archive, the history of the Yivo Sound Archive. And that is her dissertation. But this will still will soon be available. The story, kind of a condensed version of the story will soon be available in the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music. For those of you who didn't know there was an Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music. So how about that? That's another accomplishment. So we're going to start with Henry, the founder of the sound archive at yivo. And it's really an amazing story in my mind because, you know, I mean, I'm someone who had recordings, Jewish recordings in my family. And I'd seen them in closets in various places in various Jewish music libraries around the country, but they were in closets. I mean, they were not anything that was really accessible to anyone. And even when Henry went to Moashe of Folkways Records, who in fact, in his career had put out more than 70 records with Jewish themes, his reaction was, who's going to listen to this crap? So this is in Henry's book, by the way, which I highly recommend. So I want to ask Henry, how did this happen? That Yivo actually became the home of a sound archive whose goal was really to disseminate this music, to put it up front, you know, not to be favoring other kinds of Jewish music, but really to put this right out front as something that would be a cornerstone and a wellspring for the next generation.
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D
Well, thanks. Thanks, Hank. First of all, it's thrilling to be here to talk about this. As you mentioned, the story of the sound archives actually starts around the corner from the EVO at the Martin Steinberg center of the American Jewish Congress. In 1977, the founder of the Martin Steinberg center, the late Jeff Oler, created a center for Jewish artists. And they applied for and got a ceta, a Comprehensive Employment Training Act Grant for the Arts. And Jeff Ober wanted to create an ingathering of Jewish artists. So the sort of the hiring of people to run various Jewish arts. I was hired. In fact, a person who hired me was Ruth Rubin. She was the chair of the committee. And I was hired to run a team of people doing various research in different aspects of Jewish music. Now, as you said, I had come out of playing old time music and early ragtime, and I was already really enthused about 78s. And so I ended up doing. I ended up going around the corner to. To. To. To the yivo. But at that time, even though Yivo it didn't have a collection so much as they had an assemblage, there were recordings throughout the building, just peppered throughout everything down from the sub basement up to the attic. Records were stored away in. In closets and in cabinets. So there was no accession catalog. In fact, the only catalog that existed at that time was 3 by 5 cards with accession numbers. It wasn't cataloged by the original record catalog number or the matrix numbers. So the fortuitous thing at that time was that the Balkan Arts center had just sponsored a major concert with Dave Terrace and Andy Stadtman. And it just brought people in from everywhere, including Dick Spotswood, who had come up from Washington and was working on what was soon to be the major publication, Ethnic Music on Records, the listing of all ethnic recordings made in the United States from 1895-19 too. And we met there and he hired me to kind of be his truffle hound, to oversee the research on Yiddish records. And my interest was in klezmer music. That was what got me back into Jewish music. So the sound archives was really the. The.
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C
The.
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D
The. The. It wasn't the sound archives yet. It was just. Still, they were humoring me. They were a lot. In fact, Yivo didn't have anything to play the records on. I would have to bring my own turntable in to play these records and to make these meatball dubs off the 78s. But we benefited from Dick Spotswood's discographic cataloging system. The Yivo was the first Jewish archives anywhere to use a modern discographic cataloging system that was developed for the study of jazz and blues and country. So this was kind of critical, but the thing that I used this opportunity to kind of organize the records at the EVO. And in 1981, as you said, I went to see Moash Son of Sholem as the great Yiddish writer. And at that point, Mo hadn't put out a Jewish record in years. He had. He had just like stopped being interested. And I. And I guess he was humoring me. But, you know, we did. We put out the record and I. It was thanks to Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblet again for bringing together the resources and for helping me conceptualize the project. So two things happened in 1981. First was the issue of the folkways Klezmer record. Up until that point was all in juke music. It was just hazones And Yiddish theater. So small labels, Tikva Collectors Guild, they had only been doing those reissues. So the Folk Boys record was the first record to redress that to be on klezmer music. The other thing that happened in 1981 was the release of the film Image Before My Eyes and super important documentary, again focusing attention on the Yivo collections. One of the outcomes of the success of Image was one of the a supporter of the evo, Someone who actually Sam Norich had known from his years at the UW in Madison, Wisconsin, where I am at the moment. And he was so enthused by Image Before My Eyes that he approached Sam and said, I want to put money up for a new film for another Image two or whatever. And Sam happily talked him out of it by saying, look, whatever you want to put up, it's not going to be enough to make a film, but it would be enough to start a sound archives. So the $60,000 that Lawrence Weinstein put in got the Max and Freda Weinstein archives started. Unfortunately, or semi fortunately, a decision was made by the archives that I could not use the money could not be used for purchasing professional equipment. I wanted to start a state of the art sound archives. They wanted the money to go more to pay my salary. So I had to redirect my energy to buy consumer versions of professional equipment. And that's when I went to buy it. And the place I went to, Tech hi Fi, the chief salesman was a guy named Dan Peck, and he picked out all the equipment for us. And about a year later, when he lost his job at Tech hi Fi, he actually came on as the first technical assistant at the evo. He was doing all the transfers because of his experience with electronics. So that became the kind of the cornerstone. We were given an office on the fifth floor, which we dubbed the fifth floor Autonomous region. Few people came up to the fifth floor, luckily for us. And it was a glorious time. Josh Waleczky was across the hall. Lutzy and Dobrashinsky was down the hall. Marek Webb just. It was an amazing time to be collecting these records and to have people who grew up with this music on site who could add this visceral contextualization of the music. The actual first big push to getting records into the collection. There were probably 100 or 278s in the collection at that time. But because of my involvement with old time music and stuff and 78 collectors, I was able to get a lot of the major collectors in New York who were jazz aficionados and stuff to donate the Yiddish records. In fact, they had been using Yiddish records for years as packing for jazz records. They called them the Greenies. They used them instead of, you know, instead of the popcorn. They used them because those were the records that would break first if you were sending them. So they were happy to get, you know, because I was buying them for 10 cents and 25 cents each. So I was able to bring in a lot of these records that. That didn't really have another source. And the collection, like Topsy, as they say, just grow is amazing.
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C
You also. Yeah, these people who were evo at that time. I remember in the liner notes that Zev Feldman also had something to do with the first record. Writing. Writing, yeah.
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D
And Andy.
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C
Yeah, that's right.
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D
Andy also is great. Asked both Zev and Andy to write sections. So that was really thrilling.
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C
That's right. So at some point, you needed to send out for reinforcements. And luckily, Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblet, who was on this call, I believe, recommended Jenny Romaine, who was incredibly active, again, really kind of, I would say, reimagining Jewish history with her incredible puppets and plays. And so, Jenny, why don't you talk about how you became involved in this?
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F
Thank you so much. Great stories. You know, it's very humbling. Fantastic storytelling, Henry. I, of course, was a student of Dr. Kirschenblatt Gimblet, and I had really been blessed to have a very, very close relationship with her and, you know, really came to understand the power of folk culture and its connection to giant stories that were political stories that were spiritual stories that were, you know, just the stuff of life. And her ability to hold the complexity of, you know, postmodern art traditions and legacies of colonialism. And, like, you know, I just felt like. So I just have to say that out loud, like my mentor. And, of course, I came from a wonderful secular Yiddish radical milieu where all of those values were also echoed. And a lot of my people were refugees from a more religious world. So going back in, you know, again, privilege, like, getting to go back in on your own terms. But Barbara had gotten me a job cataloging records for folkways that were cleaning out their office. And so I went there, and it was all very, you know, kind of DIY cataloging. And so when I got to Yivo, I mean, I came with, like, a native listener knowledge. Like, I understood what this was and what I was looking at. And the milieu at the time at the organization was that it was like, survivors, like resistance, partisan fighters. So that was another reason why I felt comfortable there. It's like, yeah, they were like the super intense librarians and whatever, but like the person who ran it, Hannah Frischdorf, was a partisan in Warsaw. And like, these are the people I had been trained to venerate. Like, these were our leaders, these were our revolutionary fighters against fascism. So I'm like, okay, you know, so the whole thing had a dignity and an importance to it. And so I just tried to apply everything I knew and had been trained to do to this work. And, you know, like I said, it was so lucky to be there. And I felt also what, you know, I was encountering all these musicians who could relate to the material they were working with. And for me it was, I would say, a relationship, as Hankus mentioned, to the entire archive. You know, like the idea of this being multiple publics and the focus on how people lived rather than how they died. And so I would say, like, that was another value. And for some reason, what I'm thinking of sharing here is about values that were there. And there were a lot of queer people there. So it was kind of like experimental artists, people seeing the leap tradition as being a way to move forward. Folk power as opposed to top down power or rabbinic power. Yes, great respect. But, you know, the leadership of a Vilna partisan, I mean, or a war, so partisan, was a certain kind of leadership that came from necessity, up against the wall kind of thing. So I don't know, I feel like I just wanted to give a big shout out, rich shout out to that place in time.
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C
Incredible. And working with these musical materials was something that you came to very easily, it seemed.
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F
Yeah, I mean, I have. I been in around a lot of musical places. I think sometimes my distance from it also gave me a critical thing. So people would be coming in and looking for something, but I'd be like, have you thought about, like the social relationship of this to that? Or the way you're going to look at this might be, you know, like people would come in looking for a record and, you know, Maya's free association. Webb would be different than someone who is primarily an instrumentalist. Like, having studied a lot of post colonial theory and experimental theater, you know, having a relationship to the artistic traditions that were also kind of elastic. Like, don't assume that because something's folk, it's so called primitive, uncomplicated or not evolving, you know, I think also puppetry brings you to that because it's a folk form that's like always pushing, even though it's Considered very traditional.
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C
So amazing. That's amazing. So. So the next person to come on board was Lauren Skleinberg. And Lauren had been working with Henry for Klezkamp, had also been working on various projects at Yivo. And Yivo was the originator of CLZ camp in 1985, soon after Clezcamp became independent from Yivo through an organization called Living Traditions that Henry founded along with Sherry Mayrent. Lauren and Lauren. Oh, originally with Lauren. Okay, so please, Lauren, tell us how you. And of course Lauren was already well known as a, as a, as a vocalist in many capacities in New York, but by the time you. The Plasmatics were starting around that time in the, in the late 80s, I believe. So anyhow, tell us about how you came to this.
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A
Okay, so clismatics started in 1986 and I was actually originally hired at Nivo as Adrian Cooper's assistant, our late great colleague and mentor and, and teacher. And so I was at Yivo as kind of a bit of a jack of all trades for about seven years. It's very biblical. And so. And then I was gone from Evo for about seven years, working with Henry at Living Traditions and running Klez Camp. And Jenny had been running the sound archives on her own and she had left and Jim Leffler filled in a gap in between. And I found out that the soundarchive position was open. And it's like, oh my goodness, this is something that I sort of need to do.
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C
So
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A
I asked Henry because I kind of felt like it was, is it okay with you if I apply for this job? And he said, yeah, sure. So I applied to the head of Yivo at the time, who was Carl Reins, Dr. Carl Rines. And he and Marek Webb, the former head archivist, late head archivist, hired me on a part time basis. And so that was in 2000. And originally I was doing both Living Traditions and Yivo at the same time. And then I decided that after 14 years of running Clous Camp, it was time, you know, to, to do something else. So I, I left Living Traditions and I started just my only day job was, was this. So I've been here since then and I've almost been at Yivo for a total of 30 years, which is hard to believe.
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C
Fantastic.
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A
Yeah. So, so in that time, I mean, it sort of trying to keep the sound archive going and sort of expanding what like our focus is, has been one of, I suppose, the things that we've done. And also with Eleanor on board now, and because now there are, you know, there There are other large collections of, of shellac records that, that are digitizing their collections. And so you have the FAU and you have the Mayrant collection and, and, and such. And they're all kind of, they're all basically the same with their complementary to each other. It's like one fills in the gaps that other one doesn't have and such. So we started looking at our non commercial materials because those were things that you couldn't find really anywhere else. And the first one of those that we really started, started working on was the Ruth Rubin collection of field recordings of Yiddish Folk songs. And I was nudged as a shout out to Sandy Wolofski of Canada, who gave me a very, very large kick in my butt about getting that happening. And she helped raise a bit of money to work on that. And so we, through a nice coincidence in availability of a particular kind of software and some funding, we managed to put up a very large portion. We're not finished yet, but a very large portion of Ruth Rubin's collection and work contacted her family, contacted the documentarian who made the film about her and found through the good graces of Aviva Weintraub at the Jewish Museum, found the outtakes from the documentary. And so we've little by little been amassing all this material. So that's ruthrubin.yivo.org if you want to check it out. And you know, please, that collection has been. People have been using it as a resource since it went up and that's been very important and Eleanor was very instrumental in helping that happen. The other thing that has happened was that Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblet. Gave us all the material from the Yiddish Folk Song project that she conducted in the 1970s and we applied for a grant for that. And now all of that material, at least the sound portion of it has been digitized and that's all up on our regular the center for Jewish Histories database. And all of those materials can be listened to now. And the paper material is, is coming next somewhere down the road.
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F
So.
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A
And in the meantime we've continued to make the attempt of getting the, the various commercial recording collection catalogs online. The, the, the 78 collection has grown to somewhere around 3,600 discs. The LP collection is probably about the same size, but that's still in the works. And we've also, again, Eleanor's been very, the biggest part of this. We've assembled a list of all the sound materials that we could find in the YIVO archives at large. And you Know, the idea is we're making our way through it, you know, as we go and trying to get that stuff, you know, cataloged and hopefully digitized and putting it out there as we can. So that's the short version of the story.
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C
Yeah, Yeah. I love that you talked about your curation of, of specific reissues because, I mean, I just love those things. I mean, you have these rare recordings from Argentina and recordings by cantors who never had commercial contracts and. Yeah, incredible.
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A
Yeah, the Argentina records I, I carried back with me 75 shellac records on an airplane and, and, and a large number of LPs that I put in a suitcase because I had made contact with radio high in, in Buenos Aires and they gave us all this stuff that was just sitting in piles on their floor and they weren't, they weren't using them. So, so that stuff, you know, filled a big hole in our collection because we didn't virtually didn't have anything from, from Argentina, you know, and we want more. So.
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C
Amazing. So that's fantastic. So the, the newest curator of this collection is Eleanor. And unlike these other three, Eleanor came from Paris where there was a Jewish music scene that actually Americans knew very little about, I would say, and grew up in that milieu. And so please tell us how you got to Yivo from your background.
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E
Oh yeah. So okay, where to start? Well, first of all, I have to say that I'm like very honored to be on this panel and hearing all the names of the amazing people who contributed with Ruben and Barbara Keshlett Giblett, Adrian Cooper and everyone on the panel is like being on the footsteps is really an honor and wonderful. So yeah, so in Paris, I grew up in a Yiddish speaking family. I didn't really spoke Yiddish, but. And I was playing violin and I started studying Yiddish and I started, started studying klezmer music not only in Paris, but wherever it was and also in Paris. And I, I started studying more klezmer music through my studies in geography. And so I started coming to New York to do field work and I started working in the Yivo sound archive as a researcher using the Yivo sound archive. And then this led me to work in Paris at the Institut Institute for European Institute for Jewish Music in Paris with Herve Rotten. And we, I co. We released. Sorry. We released a historical recording from label LSDisk which was like a post war. A label from the post war years in Paris, like cabaret music and, and such. And in 2014 I was still living in France and I came, I attended a song class that Laureen was teaching on the Ruth Rubin repertoire. And I was kind of really amazed by the. The repertoire. And I went back to France and I started a band, because I'm also a singer and I play violin. So I started a band there, and we. And I started focusing this project on the Ruth Rubin collection. And then I. I decided to come to New York and Lauren, just at the same time. It was very. It was a bit uncanny how it happened, but just at the same time, Lauren was looking for an assistant. It just, like, serendipitously happened that I started working in the sound archives just at the moment when the ruthurbin collection was pretty much ready to be published online. And so I helped with that. That was the first big project that I was involved with in the sound archive. Yes. And then I was also, like. I had continued my studies in history in a PhD in France, and after a few months of moving to New York and working in the archive, I dropped out. But then after that, I realized that the PhD was just in front of me and that the work that I was trying to do to understand what was there to scratch everyone's brain, to figure out what is in these boxes. So I thought that was actually worth being written about. So I managed to finish my dissertation because I found this purpose as an archivist to write about the archives.
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C
Amazing. And the generational continuity is also something that's very striking in this group here, and that Eleonore is there disseminating the work of Ruth Rubin. And if you haven't looked at that aspect of the Yivo website, please do. It's extraordinary. And it was kind of a dream that, that Ruth had that someday this material would really be accessible. I do remember her talking about, yes, I gave copies of my collection to four different places so everyone can have it now. And it's like, well, now there's the Internet. Ruth, of course, passed away in the late 90s. So it's really remarkable and an incredible achievement for Yivo to have that. Have that up there. And so I'm just wondering if any, you know, we'll. We'll get to the Q and A in a minute. But, you know, when I think of this archive, I just think of it as something that opened a door that needed to be open, you know, that, that. That an organization taking this seriously enough to have brought in these, you know, people to actually host it. But not only up, it brought in activists, brought in people who really felt strongly that this material just needed to be out there, not just sitting In a. You know, in an archive. I mean, it's a different kind of archive. It's an archive where you come in, you know, and there it is, or you find the material on the website. So I just wonder if any of you have any thoughts about that. What is the future of this kind of. This of kind. This kind of endeavor in our time? Eleanor, you look like you want.
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E
Sure, yeah. Well, I mean, I can talk about what we're doing now for the future because, yeah, this is a. The position of archivist is like being this link between the material that's there that maybe last, if nothing is done with it. And also try to think forward how it will be needed, what is needed to do with it so that it can be used. And I mean, just before I really answer your question, the dissertation I wrote really was stressing that it is a living space. I mean, I was really amazed to see the connection of the early, the klezmer revival and the necessity of the archive for the revival to happen, but also the necessity of this artistic, cultural dynamic for the archive to exist as well. So I think it's a very beautiful living thing that exists in a circulation between the inside of the archive and the outside of the archive. And that is. And it. It bounces like with what people do with it on stages, wherever people bring it. And it creates new layers of archive sometimes, but also of meanings and context that the material is linked with outside. But so just to answer your question, a bit more straightforward. So we're now trying to basically identify all the collections in the archives and describe them, at least the collection level, so that people can see what is in the archive. That's the first step. And then certain collections, we go deeper in the description. And. And something that we've learned also by doing this work of archiving and describing things is that it's an iterative process. So we start with describing the collection as a whole. Okay, There is that many reel to reel tapes in this collection. And then later on we can come back and describe it with more granularity and that it's a very long, tedious process. So we do it by stages like that. And now what we're trying to do is to identify all the different collections and at least having collection level description for all of those.
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C
I mean. Yeah, so I'll just. Before we get to the questions, I'll just say, I mean, the amazing thing is just how broad the range is of this archive and how generationally important it is, how for so many people in different generations it's really a key resource, something that, you know, people, really young people are really depending on this. You know, it's a. So I just wanted to just stress the importance of this, that when this archive started, it was for a few people perhaps, and now it's really for everyone. Henry, go ahead.
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D
Well, I mean, and I thank you for bringing that up because the original intention and what was of establishing an open access proactive archives. So for example, at that time, if you wanted to hear old Yiddish records, you would have to go to the Lincoln center and the. The public library. And they had a policy where they would play the actual disc, but you only got three plays. They would only play the record for you three times, and then that was it.
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A
And.
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D
And I just found at that point, archives were. You had to have the, the, you know, the magic word in order to gain access. And then, in fact, that was one of the first things that we did with, With.
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C
With.
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D
With Dan was to not only create archival copies on open real at a high speed, which was the best we could do, seven and a half inches per second, but we also created open access cassette copies of all the dubs. And, and this was to. To. To do away with the fact that you had to go through this process and in fact, the whole thing of open access, that was really the motivation to the founding of Clescamp, that we needed to create a viable platform where this stuff could be both accessed and really created in a real time, so that you had people who both understood the prehistory and also how it could be applied to the, you know, the fledgling klezmer revival, which there were what, five bands at that time. So. So it was an original intention. And now based on that, I mean, this has just grown through, you know, exponentially.
- [41:20]
C
Yes, exactly. So we should get to the Q and A. So I'm going to go right to that and we'll see what we've got here for these questions here. So I'm not sure what this first question is. Oh, that's interesting. What is the hardest part or easiest part of saving finding sharing these recordings at the beginning and now?
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D
Well, I'll take the beginning first. You know, I mean, this is a. This was a world without YouTube. So dissemination was still done in an analog process, that is by reissues. So for example, the sound archives would be. The first reissue was the klezmer reissue. But then Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblet's recordings of Mariam Nirenberg was. I founded a record label for a short time called Global Village. And that became a platform. So at first you had to do this stuff analog, you had to put out recordings. But. And the technology, the digital technology didn't exist for making the kind of clean copies that you could do now. So there's a, you know, it's much more possible to reach more people in a shorter amount of time now in what Lauren and Eleanor, you're doing. So it's a big change.
- [42:52]
C
Yes. Thank you. So we have a question from Howard Levitsky, someone I admired as a child in Philadelphia, a wonderful, wonderful musician, the pianist who I think went to Central High, as I did, and he says he was engaged as an accompanist by a soprano specializing in Yiddish art songs. Amazed at the quality of the music in this niche repertoire. I wonder if that was Barbara Moscow. Anyhow, can you speak to any of this repertoire in the archive? So if people are looking for Jewish arts on repertoire, and I think Lauren will have something to say about that.
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A
Well, yeah, one of the things that has happened here because with the passing of Hanam Lotek, Yivo no longer has a dedicated music archivist. So a lot of the music sort of questions get, you know, get, get fielded to, to Eleanor and, and I. And so on top of which Yivo has in, in recent years with, with, you know, sort of a revitalized public program series, has been exploring a lot of, a lot of Yiddish. Yiddish art song materials, both, both things from the past and also things that are being currently written in that field. So, you know, people like Isa Kremer or Fegela Panitz or these sorts of singers or Cedar Bilarsky, you know, we sort of have, as, you know, the years have rolled by, we've become, you know, here become much more familiar with, you know, the breath of what these singers have put out and also, you know, can tie them in more easily to other kinds of, you know, Yiddish vocal music and, and sort of understand, you know, what they were trying to do and, you know, what it is about that makes that approach to, you know, Yiddish song, you know, unique and special.
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E
Yes. May I add something about it?
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A
Sure, sure.
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E
Yeah. I found it also very interesting, writing the dissertation to make this parallel between the creation of the sound archive by a group of revivalists of the music in the late 70s, early 80s, and also look at the early 20th century folks from St. Petersburg who were also collecting with the idea in mind to create new works. And Alex Weiser, our public program director, also done a lot of work on this, on the art songs. So, yes, there is indeed a lot of resources and a lot of new interests as well in it.
- [45:49]
C
Fantastic. Well, so let's just keep going through the questions. I'm going to answer the next two just very quickly. How did FAU start? That was Nathan Tininoff and that's a very different thing. It's a non curated collection, a very, very large collection and they of course have made use of the incredible power of Jewish retired labor in South Florida. So they have like an army there digitizing things. And it's also a wonderful resource. The only thing about it is it's never actually been run by musicians. So it's interesting. So you really. You find out what's there by sifting through it. But it is an amazing resource and it's a fantastic addition to the resources. Will Jump at Night in the Garden of Eden be released on dvd? I think it has been. Yay. Okay, that has. Featuring Henry Sapoznik and Hankos Netsky. Okay, let's move ahead here. How would I be able to research music from the Jewish population native to the general area of Babrusk, Russia? I would like to choreograph a dance piece for this purpose, but I need to find the music and listen to it. That's an interesting question. That really would be something, you know, maybe go to Russia now. Bobrusk. I do want to say that's in Belarus and there's a wonderful resource, Ziesel Slapovich in New York, who I would suggest getting in touch with. Okay, so that's not too hard to do. What's this next thing? Any thoughts on Jonathan Ward's work on international lost found shellac work around the world? Any link with his work? Anyone have anything to say about that? I don't know anything about it. So we'll be looking that up. Thank you. Did somebody say something about that? Okay, yeah. If somebody knows in the chat, that's great. That's right. You could answer that in the chat.
- [47:56]
D
Probably.
- [47:57]
C
Has anyone any work been done as of yet on linking the sheet music published for years in the equivalent pieces recorded on 78 RPM or LP and or CD B discs? That's a really great question. We all do it for ourselves.
- [48:15]
D
There's actually. It's kind of a. It's it. You would sing on the. On the face of it, you would think oh my God, you've got this massive parallel universe of printed sheet music and commercial sound recordings. But even a cursory exam there I was surprised way at the beginning how little of the sheet music is Reflected in the commercial recordings and how few commercial recordings are based on sheet music. I probably maybe 10% or 15% of either. So that should not be a gargantuan project to finally hook up these two collections.
- [48:54]
C
Yeah, I have to say I've done some work on that for the Yiddish Book center in exhibits and also. But, you know, it's funny, I've put proposals out there that talk about the lack of materials that do that. And, you know, funding is really what's needed for that, honestly, because there's not really an organization whose goal is to do that.
- [49:16]
E
There actually is.
- [49:18]
C
Oh, good. Go ahead.
- [49:20]
E
The Klezmer Institute is doing. Partner to this event, actually is working on creating tools to link manuscripts, sheet music and recordings from catalogs and from existing collections. And the starting point of this is actually the manuscripts that were just made accessible at the Vernadsky Library in Kiev, the Ukraine National Library. And so the goal of the two, it has received Phase 1 NEH grants. And hopefully there will be more funding for this. But the whole project is meant to think like musicians and to think like researchers and create tools that can allow to create those links. Because what is a tune with all the variants and how do you identify them? How do you decide if it has the same first section, second section, but not the same third section? Is it the same tune? Is it a variant? Is it a different tune? And all of that. So a way to be able to still create links between all those things and treated versions as well, like have variants.
- [50:56]
C
I think the question really was more, though, about Yiddish theater and folk music. And what you do find is, if you look in folk, for example, in the wonderful melodic books, in a lot of cases, in fact, in the back of the book, I think, you know, there are. There are references to recordings. In Pasternak's books of Hasidic music, there are references to recordings. So, I mean, that's great.
- [51:24]
D
It's funny.
- [51:25]
C
It's interesting that the place where there really isn't is Yiddish theater. And I guess that's really. That's the one that I think is a huge gap, I have to say. But you're so right about the work of the Klezmer Institute is amazing, specifically doing this with Klezmer. And I have in my hand, in fact, the disc from the Beregovsky volume that Mark Sloban put out. And I remember we, you know, paired the manuscripts with recordings on that. So people are doing little bits of work on this. And the Kosmer Institute is doing amazing work on this large scale.
- [51:58]
A
The Lotek family has in the works a website dedicated to Hanna's work, which will include digitizing the books. I know that they're working on that and I know that they're. And all of her papers are here and I know that they're going to be doing some research here among her. The recordings that she had that people sent her to do that where she did research and such. Funny enough, I taught a class for Klesfest London where the re. The textbook for the class was Songs of Generations because they had extra copies of it and they wanted to sell them off. So they made me teach from that. But part of working on that material was that I went through and found source recordings for all of the songs in that book. So I have actually a database of recordings from that book. But we, I would say generally speaking, we do a lot of research work for people where we do that as part of what we do here. So we Evan. So slowly sort of amassing kind of a, you know, a library of, of recordings that match up with, with sheet music and such. So, you know, it's not particularly organized in a particular way, but it's, but it's. That's one thing that is happening that, you know, with the fact that we have computers and a database and a server and we do that a lot.
- [53:53]
C
Thank you, Lauren. So here's another one. How different is the access to YIVO's material to NYPL access? And the answer is there are two libraries in different places, I would say. And you can walk in the New York Public Library or yivo. So there are different collections. And New York Public Library has a massive collection too, especially of sheet music. And a couple questions here. Besides getting the catalog online, what are other planned future projects of the sound archive? Any, anything to say about that owner or anyone online?
- [54:31]
E
Sure. So the big project that we're working on, it's probably a multi year project, but it's the digitization of all the Bund material. So there is a few hundreds reel to reel tapes. Also some of them are workmen circle or worker circle and Bund and Jewish Labor Committee. So a lot of labor history is being now cataloged and will be digitized. But so don't be too impatient because it takes time and yeah, that's I guess the main one. And then other smaller collections that are going to appear on the Yivo Archive website.
- [55:33]
C
Wonderful, great.
- [55:35]
A
We've started some smaller projects of digitizing audio cassettes just because we can, we can throw them on, you know, the machines here while we're working on other stuff. And so, for instance, Eric Goldman from Ergo Media has given us this collection of taped interviews he has with the stars of different films that he issued commercially. And those are very interesting. And they're one of a kind things that don't exist anywhere else. So there's a lot of little pockets of things that we're sort of making our way through like that, that are things that are manageable for us that aren't like huge, gigantic things, but that we can take them. We can make, you know, a database of notating what's on them and digitize the materials and then put them on our server. And, you know, things like that are things you'll be seeing, I think, a lot more of.
- [56:43]
E
Yeah, yeah. Also the dialect project, that. Which was a project led by Beatrice Weinreich, which. Jenny, I think you cataloged this. So we were using this catal. It's actually already the finding. It is actually already on the online. And so that's also like a finite collection that we can digitize and add. So we're working by little shanks.
- [57:19]
C
Great. So we're going to wind up pretty soon, but I want to get in a few more questions. There's a bunch of questions that really don't have anything to do with the sound archive, so I'm not really going to go to those, but they're questions for Yivo's administration, I suppose. Now, the. But one question that I thought is great. Did you ever exclude anything from the soundarchive because of the controversial nature of its content and in other words, records that need parental advisories like Joe and Paul? I don't know.
- [57:54]
D
Not at the beginning. I mean, honestly, there was. There was no point in creating. I mean, the whole point in creating an archives was creating open access. And certainly, and I don't have to tell you, Hank, for any of us in the beginning, these early sound recordings were lifeblood for us because we didn't really have a lot of active living models who we could depend on. So the whole point was to put this stuff out. I mean, to be honest, at the beginning, there was a real conflict at the Yivo, because of the conflict between paper archivists and libraries looked down on mass media at the time. So we had a struggle to create the value of mass marketing materials, which were considered watering down the culture. So there was a sense that the entire sound archives was a kind of, you know, destabilization of the higher literacy. So I think just doing any of the Recordings was a triumph to get away from, you know, censorship.
- [59:07]
C
Amazing. Yeah. Thank you for that, Henry. That's great. And Jenny has something to say about that.
- [59:13]
F
I just think one of the super cool things that I credit everyone, and especially Lauren for this were the Israeli Zionist recordings and the legacy of Yiddish in Israel.
- [59:24]
E
And I.
- [59:24]
F
And I feel like, you know, sometimes it would be like, oh, what's this? Like, this emerges from a definitely East European root, you know, and then. And there are also these incredible Yiddish singers, but then sometimes there was this vague or interesting area. Lauren, I wondered if you would talk about that.
- [59:42]
A
I think it's important. It's important to, you know, I think part of it has to do with my. Just my personal background and, you know, the music that I'm familiar with. And. But that. I mean that I think that we sort of. We sort of keep anything that's somehow relatable, you know, to the collection at large. So I think we're, you know, we're sort of like, you know, at this point, I don't think we generally keep, you know, keep copies of things that are, you know, related to Ashkenazic music and some things that aren't necessarily, but that are. That are Jewish, just because, you know, sometimes a smattering of other. Of other stuff. But I think, you know, a lot of times it's like, you know, you listen to things, you say, oh, you know, where does that. Where does that come from? And it's like, I think it's important. Important to. I mean, Eleanor was going to talk about how, for instance, we have material that is. That is not. Not just things that. That are, you know, say, blue material, but also things that are offensive. But I think that it's important to have a picture of this, the whole big world, and you just have to, you know, have it. Either you. You notate it, or you say that it's available by request. I mean, we haven't, you know, we haven't. Some things we haven't really decided, you know, but I don't think. I don't think we should necessarily get rid of them.
- [61:22]
C
All right, well, we're going to wrap. We're going to wrap up this discussion. I think we're going. People can stay online there a little bit. I do want to say one thing. We've also gotten in the Q and A is a request for more programs like the great one that Lauren did last year of. Of presenting Songs from the Archives or a few years back. And that's something that would be wonderful to see. You know, the archive kind of, you know, with public. Public performances. But in fact, that's. That's happened quite a bit. I remember one. One on Ruth Rubin's material, and. And. And I was involved in one not that long ago.
- [61:58]
A
So, yeah, we just did a concert of materials from the Yiddish Folk Song Project in. And that was really quite, like, quite special, especially coming, you know, like, what we've, you know, been going through, like, you know, with health issues and such, and being able to present a program like that, you know, with. It's a. It, you know, it feels good to be able to. To be out there and doing things like that, especially right now.
- [62:28]
C
Well, I want to thank the folks who asked me to host this very much, because this is just such a great honor, and thank our panelists, Lawrence Glenberg, Henry Zaposnik, Eleonora Muszinski, and Jenny Romain, who represent these 40 years of the sound archive at Yivo. And just so delightful to spend my afternoon with all of you and with all of you out there, so thank you so much.