Musical riches and transnational networks: the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital
Manuscript Project
Christina Crowder in conversation with Phil Alexander
A chance encounter in Tokyo a few years ago led to the sharing of a unique corpus of musical manuscripts from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine previously unavailable to klezmer musicians and scholars. The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) is an international digital humanities project connecting participants with the work of important klezmer musicians from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
The KMDMP makes materials collected by Zinovy Kiselgof during the An-ski Expeditions, and the Makonovetsky Wedding Manuscript—long-preserved in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine—available for researchers, instrumentalists, and singers around the world to engage with first hand. The project seeks to use modern digital humanities tools to transcribe and translate the music and notes contained in approximately 850 high-resolution scans from hand-written notebooks (hefts) and catalogue into digital formats for further study and performance.
Christina Crowder has been performing and researching Jewish music for over nearly 30 years, beginning in Budapest, Hungary in 1993, 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 an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for 2021-2022. 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 Goldenshtayn Kompaniye, and the Dave Levitt Klezmer Trio. 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.”
Phil Alexander is an Edinburgh-based musician, composer, and academic. He is currently a British Academy postdoctoral research fellow and the University of Edinburgh, where he is researching Scottish-Jewish musical life of the early 20th century. As part of his research, Phil launched a successful bid to include Russian-Jewish composer Isaac Hirshow as part of the BBC’s Forgotten Composers programme. Phil is currently arranging Hirshow’s music for peformance and recording by BBC orchestra and singers in 2022. His book, Sounding Jewish in Berlin: klezmer music and the contemporary city was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.