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>>I was first introduced to the idea of Yiddish 78 RPM recordings when I attended my first
Klezcamp in 1987. I went just knowing that I needed to play this music and not having
a clue how to go about it. And what I learned there that very first year was that we had
to look to these recordings which were made in the first half or the first third even
of the 20th century. Because unlike other oral traditions where people can go back to
an old country or really find the old masters at whose feet they can sit, we'd lost several
generations. We'd lost a generation or two to assimilation in the very early 20th century
and then we'd lost another generation, and what came after it in the holocaust. So, there
weren't people, so many, to learn from. And these recordings became the stand-ins for
those missing generations. And I had the idea back then this kind of fantasy dream that
I would love to start a non-profit, maybe call it the National Yiddish Music Center
or something. And get transfers, collect transfers of every extant Yiddish recording. At this
point I'm still finding things, but they tend to be the rarest of the rare. Just today,
I was looking through eBay before we got here and there were four things that I hadn't come
across before. And I put in bids on them. So, it's an ongoing thing and I really believe
that at these point I can come very close to accumulating for these collection pretty
much what's extant. And I have help now from a lot of dealers with whom I have relationships,
who will often offer me first crack at bid collection. And it's been a wonderful project
and I'm so delighted that I have the power, because I have the possession of these things
to bring them here where the library and I can partner in making them available to anyone
who wants to learn from them. I don't think anybody can dispute the importance of access
to these material because as I mentioned before these are our teachers. These are our old
masters. And in terms of learning style, and I'm just not talking about instrumental style
but vocal style, arrangement style, humor, they're spoken word things in these collection.
Everything about the language, the cadences of the language. In fact when I was learning
to play, I played the clarinet, and when I was learning myself, I spent a lot of time
listening to Yiddish theater recordings. So, if these things are going to be truly useful
to the students, and performers, and researchers who we want to give access to, they need to
be able to download them and take them home. Well, we're not there yet. But one of the
things that I loved about partnering with the library here at University of Wisconsin,
is that the people here seemed to be very committed to pushing the envelope in terms
of accessibility, and hopefully we can work together to find some way where people can
use these things usefully. Ideally I would love to see it in the situation. I don't know
what the actual resources are here at the university. But to be able to have students
to be able to download these things so that they can take some form of it off on their
iPods or other MP3 players, or in their computers and run them through software that will slow
them down or enable them to loop, or whatever it is that they need to do to learn from them.
I've already talked to people here in the Folklore and Linguistics departments about
the possibilities of some of the things like, there's a big collection within the sub-collection
of humor -dialectic humor recordings. And some of which is mostly in Yiddish and some
of which is mostly in English with Yiddish accents and everything in between as a way
of studying humor which I know people are interested in. I think the other thing that
I hope if it's not too grandiose is that these collection and what we do with it can be a
model for other people doing ethno-musicology, research, and other cultural activities in
terms of linguistics in theater and language, and all the other things that I've mentioned.
I know that the library has other 78s from the ethnic groups that were here in Wisconsin.
And I've already talked to people about using that and taking what we've done with these
transfers. And finding donors of their own who could support that kind of work here as
well. And we really hope to be a model of how these material can be used and all the
interesting things that can be done with them as we go on to the future.