Sherry Mayrent - Gramophone In Focus

The Klezmer Institute

Sherry Mayrent - Building the Mayrent Collection

Sherry MayrentSherry Mayrent earned a PhD in English from the University of Kent, Canterbury, England, and spent 12 years as a research associate at Harvard Medical School before attending her first KlezKamp in 1987. She transitioned to KlezKamp staff in 1995, and in 2001 she became the Associate Director of the program. During that period, she became clarinetist and musical director of the Wholesale Klezmer Band for 16 years.Since 2006 Sherry has assembled what has become one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Yiddish and Hebrew 78rpm recordings, which she is having digitized and entrusting to the stewardship of the Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. At over 9,000 recordings and growing, it represents over 6,000 unique performances and spans the full gamut of genres commercially recorded from 1895-1955. The discs have all been fully catalogued with over half already meticulously transferred and digitally preserved by the Grammy-award winning sound engineer Christopher King.Sherry is the founder of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at U Wisconsin, Madison, an outgrowth of her decades of involvement in the preservation and dissemination of Yiddish culture. She is a record producer and prolific composer of klezmer tunes in the traditional style. Her passion for traditional Yiddish culture is equaled only by her love of all things Hawaiian, and she serves on the board of the Mohala Hou Foundation. She divides her year between her home in Watertown, Massachusetts and her home on the Big Island of Hawaii.https://klezmeracademy.com/In Focus Series 2: Cataloguing Collecting, &amp; Contextualizing Early Recorded Jewish MusicGramophone recordings gave the modern klezmer community its earliest listen to the sound of twentieth century klezmer and Jewish music. To get to our ears, those discs were recorded onto cassette tapes and CDs and now they stream over bluetooth right into our wireless headphones—a succession of miracles of recorded sound technology. We wouldn’t have any of those sounds without the work of the collectors and discographers that we’re putting “In Focus” for this series. We’ll delve into the world of high-stakes Ebay auctions, serendipitous ephemera, chasing matrix numbers, and the utter joy of listening to improbably preserved shellac for the first time. Plus, we’ll explore the kinds of histories that can be uncovered through the careful reconstruction of recording sessions and follow the pathways of early record producers who collected the urban music that folklorists Brailoiou and Bartok scorned.About the SeriesJoin Klezmer Institute’s Christina Crowder to meet the people who have conducted some of the most important work in the documentation and collecting of early recordings of klezmer and other Jewish musics. Tune in live to ask your own questions and to participate in an intimate conversation about the day to day work of discographers and collectors that puts a focus on the personal reflections and stories that aren’t visible in the spreadsheet tables of a record catalogue.

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Sherry Mayrent - Gramophone In Focus

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