Portland EJC tune workshop 2025 — Moldavian & Bessarabia Jewish tunes

Zev Feldman tells a story that when he spoke to a Moscow radio producer in the 70s he said that they couldn’t play Moldavian music on the radio because it was too Jewish! I spent two years in Romania on a Fulbright grant (and many years after) trying to understand how Moldavian and Jewish music influenced each other. So what’s the secret? Two highly professionalized musical clans— Roma Lautari and Jewish klezmorim—playing on each other’s gigs to service the jumble of ethnic and social groups in early twentieth century Bessarabia. This workshop will present some of the musical discoveries I’ve made on this journey — klezmer tunes flipped on their head to suit fast Moldavian dances, khosidls drafted into Christian wedding rituals, and Moldavian dance tunes that would feel right at home at a Jewish wedding today.

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.”