Center for Traditional Music and Dance announces that the Stonehill Jewish Song Collection website is live – recordings of songs collected by Ben Stonehill in 1948 from DP Camp refugees being temporarily housed at the Hotel Marseilles in Manhattan. CTMD has been working with Yiddish scholar Miriam Isaacs to implement the site, and we’ll continue to expand the online offerings over time.

www.ctmd.org/stonehill.htm
A project of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance’s An-sky Institute for Jewish Culture

Milken Archive of Jewish Music is offering some free downloads in it’s “Musical Gems” series. This week, it’s Gershon Kingsley’s Shiru ladonai: L’kha dodi .
See: http://www.milkenarchive.org/promo_mp3s/view/Gershon-Kingsley-s-L-kha-dodi?key=elultwo for a free MP3 download.

Well, it’s not Jewish music, but I imagine a lot of musicians out there will be interested in this bit of library and archive news…. This is from history bibliography discussion group…. and I’ve taken a look… it is astounding what is now available online.

****************
‘Staggering’ digital folk music archive launched (M. Chilton, The
Telegraph, June 21, 2013)

The Full English, an online folk music archive of 44,000 records and over
58,000 digitized images, was launched at the English Folk Dance and Song
Society.

Read more at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/10134011/Staggering-digital-folk-music-archive-launched.html

The Full English is at:
http://www.vwml.org.uk/browse/browse-collections-full-english

You can follow their blog at http://efdss-thefullenglish.blogspot.co.uk/

Naomi Steinberger, Director of Library Services of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, announces its new blog jts-spectorarchives.tumblr.com with findings from the Johanna Spector Archival Collection.
The collection consists of papers, recordings, photos and other items related to Spector’s career as an ethnomusicologist focusing on Jewish communities of the East.

Love the “this-is-how-this-stuff-came-in pix. And…For all those out there in libraryland,… JTS is to be commended on this innovative use of online technologies to promote archival holdings! Congrats on starting your tumblr blog! We’ll all be curious to see what’s inside. And kudos to Dr. Eliott Kahn for taking on the beginning of another amazing collection. (He’s the guy that brings order to the chaos), and has created the great archival finding aids to many other Jewish music collections of note held at JTS.… CONTINUE READING >

The C & RL News, of the Association of College and Research Libraries Reports in the February 2013 issue that two archival repositories have a new innovative project to create translations from historic Yiddish newspapers and journals. The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick in the UK are jointly digitizing more than 1500 pages from Yiddish newspapers and journals. These papers are from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and were originally written for working-class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

The project will translate publications such as The Ladies’ Garment Worker. The project is looking for volunteers to translate the documents from Yiddish to English. People can help by participating in the project.… CONTINUE READING >

Lorin Sklamberg, Sound Archivist at YIVO writes:

We [YIVO] have indeed begun the work of digitizing Ruth Rubin’s collection of field recordings. A large portion of the materials were transferred and databased by Bay Area singer/instrumentalist Jeanette Lewicki over the summer with the support of New York’s Center for Traditional Music and Dance. Though far from completed, the tracks that have been processed are currently being prepared for on-site use in the not-too-distant future by YIVO Sound Archives consultant Matt Temkin.

Renewed interest in these treasures can be partially attributed to the posthumous publication of Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archives edited by Chana Mlotek and Mark Slobin (Wayne University Press, 2007). Recent projects that utilize the songs include my own Saints and Tzadiks (songs from the Irish and Yiddish traditions developed together with Susan McKeown), Voices of Ashkenaz (German-Jewish song connections explored by Andreas Schmitges, Deborah Strauss, Svetlana Kundish and Thomas Fritze) and Alpen Klezmer (Bavarian and Yiddish songs with Andrea Pancur and Ilya Shneyveys).… CONTINUE READING >

January 30, 2013?The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary
(JTS) has received a $175,300 Cataloging Hidden Special Collections
and Archives grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through a
program administered by the Council on Library Resources (CLIR). The
grant will make the archives of Dr. Johanna Spector, a major
repository of rare materials related to the dwindling Jewish
communities of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia available for
research and to the public for the first time. The collection will
now be cataloged for use, and rehoused in order to prevent
deterioration of its materials.

The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) is currently searching for a full-time Project Manager/Archivist. This is a sixteen-month grant-funded position that reports to the Administrative Librarian for Technical Services. The position is available immediately.

About The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary:
The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary holds the foremost collection of Judaica and Hebraica in the Western Hemisphere, including manuscripts, rare printed books, periodicals, ephemeral materials, musical scores, sound recordings, moving images, graphic arts, and archives. It provides access to subscription databases and to its digital collections. The JTS Library serves the students and faculty of the institution in addition to the international community of scholars in Jewish studies and related areas. Please visit our web site at www.jtsa.edu/library.xml

Position Summary:

The full-time Project Manager/Archivist will be responsible for the processing of a complex archive in the area of Jewish Ethnomusicology.… CONTINUE READING >

Many readers ask where to read articles on Jewish synagogue music. One place to start is the archive of the Journal of Synagogue Music, the publication of the Cantors Assembly. The archives of this journal is now online full text from 1967 to the present. The articles cover a wide range of topics within Jewish music, including biographical and historical materials as well as about specific pieces of music. You can keyword search the entire run, and then do a “find” in Adobe Acrobat for the location of your keyword inside a particular journal issue. The journal is located at:http://cantors.org/ca_jsm_docs.php and is available to the public.

FAU Libraries Receive Gift in Memory of Barry Serota, Executive
Director of Chicago-based Institute for Jewish Sound Recording

BOCA RATON, FL. Florida Atlantic University recently received a
gift in memory of the late Barry Serota, an attorney, record producer and executive
director of the Chicago-based Institute for Jewish Sound Recording. Serota was
widely known for his deep knowledge of Jewish music and produced more than 100
recordings of Jewish sacred and secular music. His productions at the Institute for
Jewish Sound Recording included choral, instrumental, folk and art music.
Serota s mother, Blanche, donated 1,500 LPs, more than 700 78-rpm discs, 100 digital
audio tapes and 1,443 audio reel-to-reel tapes to the Judaica Sound Archives (JSA)
at FAU Libraries in honor of her son. The collection includes rare record masters
and pre-production one-of-a-kind recordings.… CONTINUE READING >

An important new reference work has been published for identifying solo vocal works on all sorts of Jewish themes. This highly useful work gives an alphabetical list of composers with appropriate vocal works listed (not a complete list of works by each composer, but appropriately sticking to the scope of this volume). Many useful details, such as birth and death dates, place of birth, musical forces needed, first performance if known, translations of titles, and locations of scores. With some of the dramatic works, a lyricist might be named, as well as a brief synopsis of plot given.But the author doesn’t stop there; he provides useful “themes”, first based on the biblical texts, if used. In addition, he then provides themes such holidays, but also, “Jewish experience”, children’s material, philosophy, Holocaust or persecution, interfaith works, Jewish history, Yiddish theater, Sacred Services, and weddings.… CONTINUE READING >

As you may know, The Cantors Assembly has digitized it’s past issues of the Journal of Synagogue Music online. They are available in PDF format at http://www.cantors.org/ca_jsm_docs.php along with their conference proceedings. These journal issues are searchable in a general way… that is, a search term will be found from the search in all documents with that word, but the reader will have to open the specific issues (pdf) and then use his/her Adobe Acrobat reader’s “find box” to pinpoint the keyword in the document. The reader must search each of the documents separately for the search term. Still, this is a remarkable addition to the study of Jewish music and having access to so many interesting articles from the last half century from distinguished cantors and writers is a tremendous boon to Jewish educators and all of us interested in Jewish synagogue music.… CONTINUE READING >

Along with the documentary made by Roberta Grossman and Marta Kaufman that aired on PBS in 2010, there have been a few historical collections putting up materials about Hava Nagila, the ubiquitous folk tune that has become part and parcel of the American Jewish experience. Here’s some links to the history, video and archival materials that may be of interest to our readers.

First, the video, (fundraising promo about the PBS special from 2010): (about 10 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=molJ3Y6z97g

Second, the archival materials published on Flickr from the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26577116@N04/sets/72157605304880455/

Images from, Sadagora, hometown where the melody was traced:
http://pics.livejournal.com/edward_tur/pic/00320q7e

For years, the song text was attributed to Moshe Nathanson, but this claim turned out to be untrue. Later in life, Nathanson wrote to Idelsohn and apologized about accepting credit for the text, which Idelsohn had written.… CONTINUE READING >

The Library of Congress reports that the Judeo-Arabic Romanization table was
approved in February, 2011 by the Library of Congress and the
Committee for Cataloging: Asian and African Materials (CC:AAM) of the
American Library Association. The table is now available online from
the ALA-LC Romanization Tables webpage
at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html .
Bruce Chr. Johnson
The Library of Congress
Policy & Standards Division
Washington, DC 20540-4263 USA

The Milken Archive of American Jewish Music has launched their website with access through a Virtual Archive of music, video clips, interviews, biographical sketches, and articles about Jewish music and musicians. It is certainly one of the largest such collections in the world, and the materials are accessible to anyone. Those interested in American Jewish music will certainly want to mark this page or link to it for future explorations.

http://www.milkenarchive.org/

The American Society of Jewish Music announces official release of MUSICA JUDAICA ONLINE REVIEWS, which has been operating under the Editorship of Dr. Judah M. Cohen of Indiana University
since the beginning of the year.

Designed as an offshoot of Musica Judaica, the Society’s journal which is
published once a year, Musica Judaica Online Reviews (MJOR) not only allows
us to publish reviews much closer to the publication date of the book or
recording in question, but also guarantees a much wider circulation and
distribution of the reviews, to all who are interested what is being written
about in Jewish music. Moreover, at the same time, our goal is not only to
share the reviews but to engage in discussion, with readers able to submit
their comments (of course, moderated by our editor).… CONTINUE READING >

A new monthly online site that reviews music, by music librarians.
http://musicmediamonthly.com/

Family of Renowned Cleveland Music Collector Donates Tens of Thousands of Recordings to FAU Libraries

BOCA RATON, FL – The family of Jack Saul, a renowned Cleveland music collector, has gifted about 10,000 unique Jewish records to Florida Atlantic University’s Judaica Sound Archives, which already held one of the world’s largest collections of preserved and digitized Judaic audio recordings. Another 50,000 vintage 78-rpm records from Saul’s collection will be used to establish a vintage records archive at FAU Libraries. In addition, 500 jazz LPs from the gift were added to the library’s extensive jazz collection.

Saul’s gift contained many rare and popular 78 rpms, LP albums and reel-to-reel tapes. While some of the recordings were new titles for the JSA, others were duplicates and replaced recordings in the archives that were not in as good condition.… CONTINUE READING >

Listen to recordings where copyright permits – currently over 23,700 items at the website of the British Library. http://sounds.bl.uk/Default.aspx.

The Judaic library of Baltimore Hebrew, the “largest array of Judaica in the mid-Atlantic region outside the Library of Congress,” has been moving this summer to Towson University as part of a planned merger. The library hopes to be open on the second floor of the Albert S. Cook Library at Towson University by the end of August. Read the full story from the Baltimore Sun http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-te.md.bhu20jun20,0,1015335.story.

The Center for Jewish History, located in the heart of New York City, is pleased to announce that they have improved access to the collections of partners by extending the operating hours of the Lillian Goldman Reading Room and the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute to five days a week!

Scholars, students and the general public now have the opportunity to conduct onsite research on Mondays from 9:30am – 7:30pm, Tuesdays – Thursdays from 9:30am – 5:30pm, and Fridays from 9:30am – 1:30pm.

In addition to offering extended hours, the Center provides access to our partners’ collections through its Online Public Access Catalog (www.collections.cjh.org), a unique tool that offers seamless searching of library, archival and museum holdings through a single portal.

Researchers can also view more than 1,200 electronic archival finding aids and two annotated bibliographies offered by the Center, Women in Daily Life: An Online Bibliography and Holocaust Resources: An Annotated Bibliography of Archival Holdings at the Center for Jewish History.… CONTINUE READING >

The Judaica Sound ArchivesR (JSA) at Florida Atlantic University
Libraries has obtained the rights to offer on its website a major collection
of performances by the Bursteins, one of the most enduring family names in
Yiddish entertainment.

The JSA, located on FAU’s Boca Raton campus, created the collection
from holdings that had been donated to the archives at different times and
from different sources. It includes 33 albums and features the combined
works of Pesach Burstein, who produced musicals for audiences worldwide in
the 1920s; his wife, Lillian Lux, who joined his troupe when she was 17; and
their twins, Susan Burstein-Roth and Mike (Burstein) Burstyn. One can listen
to the Burstein family audio collection and read about the family’s
accomplishments at www.fau.edu/jsa.… CONTINUE READING >

Musicians should be aware of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity. According to their mission statement, the Center is:
“A non-profit educational institution in both the United States and Israel, the Center functions as a global fellowship of creative and performing artists, scholars and benefactors committed to evolving the dynamic national Jewish culture envisioned by Zionist philosopher Ahad Ha’am. To preclude the fossilization of Jewish culture, the Center stimulates and facilitates the creation of serious new cultural works from a Jewish perspective and the dissemination of the resulting artistic expression in respected public venues, thereby broadening the horizons of Jewish culture and ensuring an ongoing Jewish contribution to universal civilization.”
Lots of artists are participating in Israel and the US. For more information see:
http://www.jewishcreativity.org/home.htm… CONTINUE READING >

Top musicologists and other scholars from Snunit, Avi Chai Foundation, and Hebrew University, among others, have a new website with an English version up and running: An Invitation to Piyut. Accroding to the site: “There are two archives at the core of the website. The central archive is a collection of piyutim and melodies. Here you can find piyutim divided into various categories and run a general search on all of the piyutim. Each piyut has two central “pages.” The first offers an in-depth look at the piyut, presenting different perspectives of background, commentary, and explanation. The second is a list of melodies, including a range of melodies and performances of the piyut. The second archive contains texts and melodies not classically defined as piyutim – such as selections from Psalms or traditional Jewish prayers.… CONTINUE READING >

The Jewish Music Web Center is celebrating 10 years online this month!
My first research bibliography and organized list of Jewish websites appeared in February, 1997. I went live with the www.jmwc.org domain name the following February– making this our 10th anniversary year. In 1997, there were fewer than 75 websites devoted to Jewish music. Today, there are hundreds. The astounding growth of the Internet has allowed connections to people devoted to Jewish music all over the world.

Thank you ALL for a wonderful 10 years!

Yours,

Judy
–Boston, MA

Much information from Isaachar Fater’s book on Jewish musicians in Poland between the World Wars is now available through the Internet. There is a list of Jewish musicians who worked and lived in Poland between the two world wars.
http://www.zchor.org/fater/musicians.htm

Julian Futter wrote: Dr Rainer Lotz, who was behind the 11 CD set
“Vorbei” – Beyond recall, the survey of Jewish recordings in the Nazi
era, has just released a discography of Jewish recordings in German
speaking countries. “Discographie der Judaica-Aufnahmen”.
This book covers 78rpm recordings made from 1901 up to 1960. It is
complimentary to Spottswood since Spottwood only covers recordings made
in the USA. It is nearly 600 pages long and covers more than 400
performers. Covering all aspects of Jewish life, culture, religion and anti-semitism
it therefore also includes entries for Thomas Mann, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and
many of the leaders and functionaries of the 3rd Reich. Among other
performers there are full details for S Kwartin, J. Rosenblatt, Julius Guttmann and many others.… CONTINUE READING >

The Center for Jewish History officially declared opening of a new joint catalog (for all 5 partners) through the Center’s official website www.cjh.org This new catalog currently has records for the holdings of the library and archival collections of the Partners, which include YIVO, Yeshiva University Museum, Leo Baeck Institute, American Sephardi Federation, and the American Jewish Historical Society.
Here is a link to the new catalog:
http://aleph.cjh.org:81/F

The 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, ISMIR 2006, will be held at the Fairmont Empress Hotel in Victoria, Canada, from Sunday October 8th to Thursday October 12th, 2006.

The annual ISMIR Conference is the first established international forum for those involved in work on accessing digital musical materials. It reflects the tremendous growth of music-related data available either locally or remotely and the consequent need to search this content and retrieve music and musical information efficiently and effectively.
http://ismir2006.ismir.net/

Located in the Wimberly Library at Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton, Florida campus, the Judaica Sound Archives has grown, since its inception in 2002, into a center for the collection and preservation of Judaica sound recordings. Its unique and rapidly expanding website (www.fau.edu/jsa) allows browsers to search their 78 rpm database by artist or song title, hear the recorded works of prominent artists, and learn more about the program to rescue recorded Jewish music. The JSA’s collection includes Yiddish theater, Israeli folk, cantorial, and Sephardic music. Their goal is to be as inclusive as possible. Access to all of the digitized recordings in the JSA’s collection is possible through dedicated “research and listening stations” in the Wimberly Library. Off-site “research and listening stations” are planned for the future.… CONTINUE READING >

OCLC, the central catalog organization of most major college, university and public libraries, announces
the release of the new WorldCat.org Web site.

This site—and a downloadable WorldCat search box you can easily add to
your Web site—opens the complete WorldCat database to the public, not
just the smaller data subsets utilized by Open WorldCat partner sites such
as Google, Yahoo! Search and others. WorldCat.org builds on the success of
OCLC’s Open WorldCat Program that has elevated the visibility of library
materials on the open Web since the summer of 2003.

The main attraction of the new site is the WorldCat search box. Web users
can now search the entire WorldCat database with the method most familiar
to them: simple keywords. As in Open WorldCat, each linked result leads to
a “Find in a Library” information page.… CONTINUE READING >

Jim Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, and the director of the Jewish Music Forum, explains the origins of the song “Hava Nagila”. You can read about it online at
http://hillel.myjewishlearning.com/culture/Music/IsraeliMusicTO/IsraeliFolkMusic/Hava.htm

Teng-Leong Chew and James L. Zychowicz have announced that the following articles
have been added to the Mahler Archives:

From Symphonic Poem to Symphony: The Evolution of Mahler’s First Symphony
by James L. Zychowicz
Naturlaut 4(3): 2-7, 2005
http://mahlerarchives.net/archives/symp1.html

Mahler’s Sketches for the Tenth Symphony
by Steven D. Coburn
Naturlaut, 4(3): 13-18, 2005
http://mahlerarchives.net/archives/symp10.html

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and the Challenge of a Critical Edition: A Cautionary Tale
by James L. Zychowicz
Naturlaut 4(4):2-7, 2006
http://mahlerarchives.net/archives/symp6.html

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony in Context: What the History of Minor-key
Symphonies Can Tell Us about Mahler’s Decision about Movement Order
by Stephen D. Chakwin
Naturlaut 4(4):8-11, 2006
http://mahlerarchives.net/archives/symp6.html

American Performances of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony
by Mary Wagner
Naturlaut 4(4):13-16, 2006
http://mahlerarchives.net/archives/symp6.html

Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: Toward a Critical Discography
by Steven Vasta
Naturlaut 4(4):19-20, 2006
http://mahlerarchives.net/archives/symp6.html… CONTINUE READING >

Brown University has launced a Yiddish Sheet Music Collection as part of its Center for Digital Initiatives. So far, it’s a work in progress… they’ve digitized and catalogued about 200 pieces from holdings of around 2000 pieces of Yiddish sheet music. The project is impressive for ease of use, featuring both browsing and searching capabilities. The librarian who has catalogued this is Rosemary Cullen of the John Hay Library, featured in an article in the
Forward on March 24 . The music is available for you to enjoy (non-commercially) online, and there are lots of rewarding images of the stars of yesteryear from the Yiddish stage . Go to the Center for Digital Initiatives, at http://dl.lib.brown.edu. Toward the bottom of the screen in the bottom navigation bar, click on “Collections”.… CONTINUE READING >

If you haven’t already noticed, the Unviersity of Pennsylvania has a finding aid for its Harvey Sheldon Jewish American Music Video Research Library. This is “part of the University of Pennsylvania Library’s Judaica collections, which is one of the largest and most distinguished in the world. In particular, the Sheldon collection complements Penn’s reknown Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Music Archive”. This has VHS and DVD formats which include works by renowned Jewish composers and performances by some of America’s outstanding singers. There is an entire section devoted to Broadway/Hollywood Musicals composed by Jewish Composers and lyricists , or performers and arrangers, ranging from such works as Annie Get Your Gun to Showboat.

http://www.library.upenn.edu/cajs/sheldon.html
Even if you can’t make it to UPenn, your local public library may have many of the same items.… CONTINUE READING >

Congratulations to flautist Michael Lukin on the completion of the Song Index to the Dov Noy Collection in the Jewish National University Library (JNUL) in Jerusalem. This event will be of world wide interest to those who love Yiddish and Hebrew songs. The project involved meticulous cataloging that allows a searcher to find individual songs within a large number of Yiddish and Hebrew song anthologies and other works in this collection. Each song is searchable in the vernacular including keyword, title and author (composer and lyricist) searching. In addition, the incipit of the song, that is, the opening lines, or in some cases, some line of the refrain which may be more identifying to the song, are included in the record. Searchers may try typing in their title or even just a word of the title (keyword) to find which volumes this song may be in.… CONTINUE READING >

The Jewish National Library in Jerusalem has worked the miracle of digitizing, among other works, the 10-volumes of the Abraham Zvi Idelssohn Thesaurus of Oriental Hebrew Melodies, first published in 1923. Idelssohn, known as the father of Jewish musicology, participated nearly a century ago in field recording work in then Palestine. He recorded Jews and and non-Jewish residents of the area, taking meticulous notes both of speech, education and background of the informants, and transcribing into notation their songs from the wax cylinders her made there. From his field work and other research, he produced a ten-volume monumental study which became the basis of musicology of the various Jewish musics from throughout the world, both sacred and secular. Now, this marvelous resource of Jewish music is available online from the JNUL website.… CONTINUE READING >

The Leo Smit Foundation has a website dedicated to Dutch composer Leo Smit, who was murdered in a concentration camp in the second world war because of this Jewish origins. The website has a biography, a discography, a list of works, and some information on events of music by Leo Smit held at the Uilenburger Synagogue in Amsterdam.

http://www.leosmitstichting.nl/eng/index.htm

The Folk Music Index online is a fabulous on-line resource for tracking down some of those elusive folk songs you may be seeking. Although it says it’s an index to recordings, it does include at least some print anthologies, as well. This resource also has several links to other good sources.
http://www.ibiblio.org/folkindex/index.htm