🕵️old klezmers🎻
carkner@klezmor.im
<p>Library technician working in an accessibility library in Vancouver BC. admin of klezmor.im. MA UBC History 2019. YIVO fellow 2025. Independent researcher interested in klezmer musicians, migration, Yiddish literary world, Dutch East Indies political & journalism history, Indonesian anticolonial movement. Sporadic Wikipedia editor. He/him.📜😯🌈🎻 Current projects about New York City klezmer musicians & their milieu (1890–1945), klezmer copyright manuscripts in the US Library of Congress.</p>
Posts
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Post #4123175
was poking around YIVO's United Hebrew Trades collection and found this great stamp from the UHT Chorister's union from 1911. #LabourHistory #UnionHistory #Choirs #UnitedHebrewTrades
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Post #2423285
also tomorrow is the day i&#39;m being interviewed by a journalist about klezmer AI slop 😂 I may have to watch some heinous examples to refresh my opinions on this plague
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Post #2423284
glad this is coming together; a year ago when I was in NYC Pete Rushefsky met me and was telling me a trove of handwritten scores from cimbalom player Joseph Moskowitz had been uncovered in DC. I&#39;ll probably speak at this zoom about the old NY klezmer characters who appear in these scores. https://ctmd.org/events/joseph-moskowitz-online-archive-launch/ #klezmer #JewishMusic #MusicHistory #RomanianMusic #MusicManuscripts #archives
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Post #2423283
reminder, I&#39;m co-teaching this song workshop tomorrow at the Vancouver Peretz Centre at 12:30. with such gems as &quot;S&#39;loyfn s&#39;yogn shvartse volkn&quot; and &quot;Khanele iz fun der arbet gegangen&quot; https://www.peretz-centre.org/event-details-registration/revolutionary-yiddish-singalong-chaia-dan #Yiddish #Socialism #1905revolution #JewishMusic
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Post #2423282
salute to Arun Viswanath for this excellent catalogue he made of his great-grandmother Lifshe Schaechter-Widman&#39;s Yiddish song recordings https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bZOh9sLMlOW5cnRa6RUM9uQ6SlYgr3fYgruRo-mtVyY/edit?usp=sharing #JewishMusic #Yiddish #FolkSongs #archive
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Post #1911767
salute to my friends who have this new album out of historical #klezmer music from the KMDMP project I volunteered for years back. looking forward to listening to it. https://klezmerinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/tunes-from-the-kiselgof-makonovetsky-corpus #JewishMusic #BandcampFriday #FolkMusic #accordion
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Post #1757177
tickets have gone on sale for the event I&#39;ve been working on preparing for a year, the Vancouver Peretz Centre&#39;s 80th anniversary banquet on May 23rd. I&#39;ve been helping bring to life co-director Itamar&#39;s idea of a shtetl wedding themed gala, along with award-winning writer Jess Goldman and music arrangements by me🤓there are limited low cost tickets that will probably go fast if price is an issue. https://www.peretz-centre.org/event-details-registration/peretzs-80t...
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Post #1675525
Is anyone aware of anyone doing research into American #klezmer history these days? Aside from the few well-known semi-retired professors who have published books and so on? No particular purpose, just curious.
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Post #1584380
sadly I won&#39;t be going (don&#39;t trust ICE) but this festival in #Portland looks great. includes some good friends of mine like Chaia, Christina Crowder, Shpilkis, and some cool artists I hadn&#39;t heard of before. https://collections.humanitix.com/the-portland-jewish-music-festival-2026 #PortlandOR #Klezmer #Yiddish #JewishMusic #MusicFestival
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Post #1584379
A new champion has entered the Yiddish music AI slop arena 🕵️♂️🤖 https://www.instagram.com/valery.bek Facebook group currently divided between Russians+Israelis who are tearfully saying how beautiful and Americans+Germans who are arguing whether the music is AI slop or only the video #AIslop #Yiddish #JewishMusic
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Post #1584378
I&#39;m teaching this workshop here in Vancouver on May 10 with my friend Chaia if you&#39;re interested. the same songs we explained online for Workers Circle a few months ago, but this time teaching people to sing them in person. https://www.peretz-centre.org/event-details-registration/revolutionary-yiddish-singalong-chaia-dan #Yiddish #Bundism #1905revolution #JewishMusic #Vancouver #SongWorkshop
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Post #1584377
Hitler&#39;s bunker liberated, from the depths emerge rows of sedated blonde women clones, flawed attempts to create Aryan versions of the Barry Sisters. they wander the streets terrifying people with their uncanny, swaying bizarro attempts at Jewish music https://www.youtube.com/@ShalomKlezmer #AIslop #UncannyValley #klezmer
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Post #1584376
My piece on organized labour and klezmer in NYC before WWI is in the second print issue of Der Spekter. Along with various pieces on diasporism and the Bund. check it out: https://derspekter.bigcartel.com/product/der-spekter-2-year-anniversary-magazine #Yiddish #Bundism #Socialism
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Post #1348543
too short-notice for me to fly cross country, and I&#39;m way too busy in May anyways, but dang this looks cool and I&#39;d love to go another year. perhaps a dulcimer-head in #Toronto on here would be interested in this? https://agakhanmuseum.org/series/hammered-series/ #HammeredDulcimer #cimbalom #santur #santoor
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Post #984567
enjoying this new Radiant Others episode with Anna Lowenstein, a great #klezmer violinist from the UK. we&#39;ve chatted a bit over the years but never met so it&#39;s great to hear her and what she&#39;s about. https://radiant-others-a.blubrry.net/anna-lowenstein/ #JewishMusic #Violinist #MusicInterview #London #Fiddler
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Post #984566
this is definitely a less nightmarish use of AI than that full on fake klezmer channel with the smiling shtetl/LES denizens, but still a somewhat tasteless presentation IMO. the song is already a bit silly but I&#39;m pretty sure Itzik Manger&#39;s intention wasn&#39;t &quot;Tally ho old chaps, let&#39;s give the Jerrys a walloping and come home to our gals!&quot; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtVUXSDASEY #AIslop #Yiddish #MisusesOfAI
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Post #984565
salute to Dan Blacksberg and his cohort featured in this article. also lol @ the subtitle &quot;A rag-tag group of younger adults has rediscovered the West Germanic language&quot; https://whyy.org/articles/yiddish-language-culture-west-philadelphia/ #Yiddish #klezmer #Philadelphia
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Post #975783
There&#39;s some cool stuff in this new batch. Nothing klezmer, but a good amount of Greek/Turkish/Ottoman music mixed in with the thousands of American discs. As someone interested in early recording industry history, I love this project. still holding out hope that they eventually release klezmer test pressings that no one has ever heard in 100 years https://www.library.ucsb.edu/recordings-added-dahr-april-2-2026 #78rpm #MusicHistory #GreekMusic #TurkishMusic
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Post #948569
Yiddish New York has put out a 2025 Call for Proposals for presentations this coming December. It&#39;s the first time they&#39;ve done it this way, and because it&#39;s hybrid you don&#39;t have to be in NYC. https://www.yiddishnewyork.com/2025-call-for-proposals/ #Yiddish #klezmer #JewishMusic #CallsForProposals
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Post #841994
I had a nice zoom chat the other day with members of this extended family and just now I took the time to rewrite the blog post. I had a lot of it right, but they explained some family lore around the name changes, who was related to whom, and why they left Egypt. Aside from the klezmer manuscript that exists from one of them, and their membership in the PMBS, I&#39;m now less sure of any klezmer connection. The family were pretty sure they were classical musicians.🤔 https://alte.klezmor.im...
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Post #841992
ah, the papers of Joseph Moskowitz, klezmer cimbalom player and owner of Moskowitz and Lupowitz restaurant, are listed in the Library of Congress. they were found by a relative in some old boxes and donated a year ago, but they&#39;re still unprocessed. hundreds of handwritten music scores (mostly Romanian-style klezmer music, but lots of American and popular music), an unpublished memoir in Romanian, lots of old photos and newspaper clippings. great stuff. https://lccn.loc.gov/2023575121...
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Post #841990
wasn&#39;t familiar with this band, but salute to them lol #klezmer
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Post #841989
this kind of thing is so cool. we know from listings that there are a fair number of klezmer test pressings from the 1910s/1920s that never saw a commercial release. none in this set yet, but I hope some surface eventually. In some cases they were done by people with no other recordings, in other cases a large catalogue but they had some that were deemed not commercially viable and never released. https://www.library.ucsb.edu/digitized-test-pressings-michael-brooks-collection #78rpm #MusicHisto...
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Post #841987
Been listening to this album on repeat while writing a review, and this track in particular is my fave. I would have believed Daniel Kahn wrote it himself, it&#39;s so on brand for him, but no: it&#39;s a translation of an equally funny 1963 German song by Georg Kreisler. https://borschtbeat.bandcamp.com/track/ich-f-hl-mich-nicht-zu-hause-nit-heymish #Yiddish #alienation
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Post #841986
My once and future collaborator Chaia is offering this 3-part online course: &quot;This class explores the tradition of Yiddish revolutionary folksong. Emerging from the revolutionary movements of early 20th century Eastern Europe, these songs carried the voices of workers and cultural activists who used them as tools of anti-fascist resistance, anti-Zionist organizing, and visions of Jewish communal identity.&quot; https://www.judaismunbound.com/2026-courses/p/yiddish-revolutionary-song...
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Post #841985
About to sing with my choir at the Peretz Centre&#39;s annual Seder, the hagode was heavily rewritten by community members this year #pesach #passover #פסח
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Post #623461
RE: https://glammr.us/@carkner/116211974075895497 this clarifies what happened to the grant I was involved with as a team member in that maybe hadn&#39;t reached active status and wasn&#39;t being defunded by this effort, although another Klezmer Institute project was, deemed as being DEI because it aimed to make music manuscripts accessible (🙄) #klezmer #NEH #DOGE
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Post #512959
I have copies left of the zine I made for my talk here in Montreal which I&#39;d be happy to mail roughly at cost $10CDN in Canada/ $10US to USA/world. It&#39;s 20 pages and gives an overview of what the Progressive Musical Benevolent Society was and profiles of some interesting members. Feel free to DM. #zines #fanzines #klezmer
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Post #486953
Kitty opportunism in the dulcimer world
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Post #486951
Romanian podcast interview (in English) with one of my favourite music youtubers Farya Faraji https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t2xejyoaFc