wrote up a blog post about my impressions of the newly-released digital archive of cimbalom player Joseph Moskowitz, which was put online this week. It's a mess, but there's a lot of great stuff in it.
https://alte.klezmor.im/2026/05/23/thoughts-on-the-new-joseph-moskowitz-archive/
#cimbalom #dulcimer #HammeredDulcimer #Romania #MusicHistory #MusicArchive #MusicManuscripts #klezmer #JewishMusic
RE: https://klezmor.im/@carkner/116597128337843519
for context a box of scores and ephemera for the eclectic klezmer cimbalom player and restaurateur Joseph Moskowitz were discovered in the attic of a relative last year and photographed and posted here. it contains a lot of his messy working scores in collaborating with other musicians and drafts of different pieces. not really organized yet but there's some cool stuff in here.
#MusicArchives #cimbalom #MusicManuscripts #klezmer #Romania #RomanianMusic
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'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
Dave posted a sample of his copyist work, though I can see that it's from a couple decades later, 1955, and by then Israeli music was getting popular.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10155845500267907&set=gm.997475920353564
A musical notation question ... I've been digitizing some handwritten scores for a klezmer workshop, all pieces by this old NY violinist Israel J. Hochman, and he often has the habit of writing a slur or line across the first two notes of triplets. Does it mean anything in particular about how it should be played?
#MusicQuestions #MusicalNotation #Violin #triplets #klezmer #MusicManuscripts
fwiw here is a google drive with my snapshots from my visit. hoping they can be sorted and scanned so I can take a better look another time.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1izt_qYPgVNT6rI-5Aiqzp2S03ICX84Gi?usp=drive_link
#Yiddish #ChoralMusic #Choir #MusicManuscripts #Montreal #WorkersCircle #ArbeterRing
It just looks like a mess of paper, but.. while I was in Montreal Josh Dolgin (Socalled) invited me to his office at McGill to look at the boxes of Yiddish choral music which were discarded after the sale of the former Arbeter Ring (Workers Circle) building. It's about 3 big boxes with many duplicates so he's still trying to match parts together and make sense of what is in there.
#archives #JewishMusic #Yiddish #Montreal #choir #MusicManuscripts #MusicHistory
[...] "Unfortunately, these were fully orchestrated, but the other parts (there's only the first violin at YIVO) have not yet been located."
Some of Joel Rubin's commentary on the context of this can be read in his "Szpilman, Bajgelman, Barsht: The Legacy of an Extended Polish Jewish Klezmer Family." Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 32 (2020): 193-218.
#klezmer #FolkMusic #PolishMusic #MusicManuscripts #MusicHistory #JewishMusic
Even out of all the old historical materials I've been looking at at YIVO, this was one of the most awe-inspiring to me. A music manuscript of Yontef Spilman of Siedlec (1827-93) "Reb Yontl", a klezmer musician, passed on by his nephew Sam Spielman who had played in his orchestra and later emigrated to New York. 🤯 I photographed all of it but it's hard to even imagine how it originally sounded.
I haven't tried playing them yet, but I thought I should make a post about the "original compositions" in the Al Glaser collection at YIVO. Whether or not they're really his, it's a numbered set that appears in several different versions in his collection, and obviously held some importance to him!🤔
https://alte.klezmor.im/2025/02/26/are-these-original-bucovina-klezmer-dances-by-al-glaser/
#klezmer #Bucovina #RomanianMusic #FolkMusic #MusicManuscripts #MusicHistory
🕵️old klezmers🎻
🍃Carkner🥺