“music”

Drawing from a kaleidoscopic range of sources in his work, Weiser engages in vibrant dialogue with voices from the past while building innovative sonic worlds for contemporary audiences.

Jan 13, 2025

Mariposas Galácticas [Galactic Butterflies] is an eight-piece band from Philadelphia that performs a fusion of kumbia [folk music from Latin America], punk, and klezmer music.

Dec 10, 2024

In The Great Dictionary of Yiddish Language: A Chamber Opera, composer Alex Weiser and librettist Ben Kaplan endow enchantment and glamor on their decidedly unglamorous protagonists and, most importantly, heighten our attention to their doubts and torments the way only an opera can. 

Jul 25, 2024

A Yiddish translation of a Protestant morning hymn reveals interreligious and intercultural exchange of religious poetry and music.

Jul 12, 2024

The POLIN Music Festival is an event dedicated to the broad spectrum of Jewish music. This year, the concert inaugurating the 6th edition of the festival took place on February 23rd at the POLIN Auditorium.

Apr 10, 2024

The creators of the 2023 album Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango grapple with complex questions about long-term trauma and the burdens of memory for women who survived the Holocaust.

Feb 23, 2024

On their album Once Upon a Time the Fire Burned Brighter: Ballads From the Yiddish Gothic, Jeremiah Lockwood and Ricky Gordon, performing as the duo Gordon Lockwood, conjure a bygone world.

May 15, 2023

"Di Froyen," the debut EP by Katherine Bulthius, performing under the moniker Olke, sets to music the first three poems in Kadya Molodowsky’s cycle of the same name.

Apr 05, 2023

As the biannual Ashkenaz festival kicked off, so did the North American Premiere of Bas Sheve, a Yiddish opera, on August 31, 2022.

Jan 13, 2023

ZETS! is the second album of the Melbourne-based band, YID!

Dec 14, 2022

Kosmopolitn, the latest Tsvey Brider release from Borscht Beat Records, is a tribute to the social and cultural dynamism of turn-of-the-twentieth century Yiddish poetic life.

Oct 20, 2022

These projects demonstrate not only how clever and creative students can be, but also the variety of ways that students can express and display their thought and learning.

Jul 13, 2022

In his concert career Zaludkovsky walked a fine line between performing the sacred identity of cantor and falling into the forms of cultural crime that he himself had identified as corrupting tradition through excessive commercialization and mediatization of sacred music.

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May 23, 2022

Isabel Frey reflects on the challenges and possibilities of performing Yiddish music as a Jewish performer in Germany and Austria beyond the insulated Berlin klezmer scene.

May 18, 2022

Mamaliga's debut album is an exciting, subtle, and intricate addition to Boston's klezmer offerings.

Feb 09, 2022

Despite the shifting status and popularity of this Ashkenazi instrumental music and its musicians, Joel Rubin is, surprisingly, the first researcher to devote serious and sustained attention to one of its most important and productive periods: New York in the 1920s, and in particular the remarkable—and nowadays canonical—recordings of its two best-known and most influential figures, Dave Tarras (1895/7-1989) and Naftule Brandwein (1884-1963).

Jan 26, 2022

With an electric guitar, distortion, and hundred-year-old Yiddish lyrics, forshpil's new album feeds the imagination with liberatory world-building.

Nov 14, 2021

This paper approaches Osvaldo Golijov’s music from the intersection of musicology and Yiddish studies.

May 02, 2021

The phenomenon of Corona songs in the frum world shows us that something quite new is happening with regard to Hasidic music.

Apr 08, 2021

Uri Schreter reviews two new albums from Daniel Kahn and Psoy Korolenko.

Feb 11, 2021

What happens when you move a klezmer festival online? Ekaterina Kuznetsova reviews Yiddish culture in the era of COVID-19 at Shtetl Berlin 2020.

Jan 19, 2021

A children’s tale, written by Shloyme Bastomski and telling the fictionalized origin story of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata

Nov 24, 2020

Faith Hillis interviews Vienna-based musician and activist Isabel Frey about her latest album, Millennial Bundist; the place of Yiddish music in contemporary left-wing politics; and Frey’s creative rewritings of revolutionary anthems.

Nov 12, 2020

Ari Kelman talks with Mark Slobin about Inside the Yiddish Folk Song, a new website project currently under construction, which aims to be an accessible, comprehensive online introduction to the full complexity of the Yiddish folk song tradition.

Feb 14, 2020

As a composer and performer of Yiddish music, Rosen confronts the fact that most members of my audience do not understand the language of the texts he performs. Yet, while music does not communicate information in the same way as language, it can lead listeners towards specific associations and meanings. There are multiple instances in which translation, imagined or guided, takes place during a musical performance and the composer and performer mediates these processes.

Dec 16, 2019

Maranne Windsperger interviews punkfolk artist Daniel Kahn about his approaches to transadaptation and translation.

Dec 16, 2019

In this groundbreaking study, Lachs draws upon often ignored documents of popular culture (conventionally written off as shund by her predecessors) in order to paint a vivid picture of working class immigrant London at the turn of the 20th century.

Nov 04, 2019

Jo Sabath talks with Francisco Dean about Dean's Frilingdik Umbazigt: As the Spring Unconquered, an electronic music piece memorializing the Holocaust that he composed and directed with high school student musicians at the Chicago Laboratory School.

Oct 17, 2019

Eisenberg reviews Shtoltse Lider, a multimedia stage show, with songs in Yiddish and English, and explanations and evocations in Swedish, from Swedish duo Ida and Louise. 

Jun 25, 2019

William Pimlott reviews Gill Tofell's Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain and Alan Dein's Music is the most beautiful language in the World: Yiddisher Jazz in London’s East End 1920s-1950s.

May 23, 2019

May 22, 2019

Apr 05, 2019

Anthony Russell, in collaboration with Veretski Pass (Joshua Horowitz on piano, Cookie Segelstein on fiddle, and Stuart Brotman on cello), intertwines Jewish Eastern Europe folk music and African American spiritual traditions. 

Nov 06, 2018