Dare to Not Be Square: Exploring The “Northern” Klezmer Dance Repertoire in the
Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Corpus

A chance encounter in Tokyo a few years ago led to the unlikely release of thousands of unique musical manuscripts in a Kyiv archive previously unavailable to contemporary klezmer musicians and scholars. This workshop will introduce a dance set of “northern” klezmer dance tunes from Belarus found in the corpus and a soulful dobriden (good morning tune) from a 12-year-old violinist. The so-called northern repertoire sounds pretty different from what we’re used to thinking of as klezmer: the tunes are simpler, with fewer modulations and fancy passages. But these are incredibly compelling tunes that are hard to stop playing! Simple on the surface, these tunes employ a variety of techniques like phrase length, extra beats, and repeating melodic patterns to create a joyful rhythmic tapestry that’s great for dancing.

Tunes will be taught by ear and with sheet music in various clefs. All ages and instruments are welcome.

All Ages $18/Person

Christina Crowder has been performing and researching Jewish music for nearly thirty years, beginning in Budapest, Hungary in 1993 as a founding member of Di Naye Kapelye, and 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 two NEH Grants for Institute projects (2021-2024). 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 Dave Levitt Klezmer Trio and many others. 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.”