Jeffrey Wollock - Gramophone In Focus

The Klezmer Institute

Jeffrey Wollock - Using Discography for Historical Discovery

Jeffrey Wollock, PhDJeffrey Wollock, Ph.D., international authority on the history of the voice, speech, hearing, gesture and language sciences, is also well known as an exponent of the traditional klezmer violin style and a klezmer historian. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Wollock began violin at 7 and viola at 12; he also studied Yiddish at a school run by poet Chonon Kiel. He began collecting old Jewish 78s before his bar mitzvah, thanks to their frequent occurrence at local bazaars and curbsides and his father's encouragement. After studying viola with Paul Doktor and earning a B.A. at Brooklyn College and an M.A. at Memorial University of Newfoundland (both in English literature), he attended the Yale School of Music, played in many orchestras and chamber groups in the United States and England, and in the late 1970s resumed viola studies with Emanuel Vardi. While freelancing he met Andy Statman, who encouraged him to learn the traditional Jewish violin style from close study of early recordings. In 1981 he received a doctorate in modern history from Oxford University and the following year he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for further study in Oxford, where he remained until mid-1986 and was very active in the musical scene. In the early 1990s Wollock got involved in the Yiddish language revival led by Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter and the klezmer revival through KlezKamp and Buffalo on the Roof. In 1993-94 he organized a series of dance workshops with live bands for the Learning Alliance, NYC, with Michael Alpert as instructor, and over the next decade worked and performed with Alpert and master clarinetist German Goldenshteyn, who had recently arrived from Ukraine. Wollock worked as a field researcher for CTMD's Soviet Jewish Cultural Inititative (Nashi Traditsii) and performed in Di Molever Kompanye with Goldenshteyn and Hersh Rikelman. For the last 25 years Wollock has researched the history of klezmer music, making presentations and publishing a series of widely-cited studies on klezmer history and discography in both English and Yiddish. He taught courses in English and History at Long Island University and the College of New Rochelle, and his Introduction to Klezmer Music (2004 &amp; 2006), in Performance Studies at Texas A&M University was perhaps the first full-credit university course entirely devoted to this subject.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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Jeffrey Wollock - Gramophone In Focus

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