Welcome!
Welcome to the demo website for the Klezmer Archive Project! It shows what the site will look like in the future as we complete more of the implementation. There's not much here right now — for example, the upper right menu items aren't live yet. The placeholders show what the site will look like in the future as we implement more of the pages.
Beyond this very drafty home page, the first pages you'll find here are sample “Item” pages for five tunes from the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) from the Motl Reyder notebook (heft). We'll be adding more tunes, browsing, and searching capabilities soon. Our Phase II NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant was terminated mid-stream in 2025. You can support continuing work on the Klezmer Archive Project by making a donation to the Klezmer Institute.
About the Klezmer Archive Project
The Klezmer Archive Project (KA) is creating a universally accessible digital archival tool for interaction, discovery, and research on available information about klezmer music and its network of contemporary and historical people. Taking individual melodies as the primary artifact, the digital archive will integrate existing tools and archival methods in novel ways to facilitate search and discovery rooted in the needs of its contemporary heritage community. Tooling and frameworks developed for the Klezmer Archive project will be available for heritage communities to adapt for their own domain-specific uses, and will be particularly useful for the preservation and study of intangible cultural heritage.
The project team is exploring newly-available open source knowledge engine technologies for organizing and validating heritage-based information, and is the first team to explore use of these tools in the Digital Humanities. The KA team is also one of the first (to our knowledge) to experiment with modeling music data directly in a knowledge graph.
The Project completed a period of research and development supported by a two-year Phase I NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG) from 2021- 2022 followed by a Phase II NEH DHAG from 2023-2025. The outcome of the Phase I grant was a white paper that described the problem space and identified the core technical elements that will be integrated together to achieve the tool that could be called the Klezmer Archive as described in the project scope. Though cut short by the termination of NEH funding in April 2025, the Phase II grant involved prototyping and testing of various components of the tool.
Read the Klezmer Archive Phase I White Paper
Visit the Klezmer Archive Dev Blog
The Klezmer Archive Project is an initiative of the Klezmer Institute. See what else we're up to at our website.
About These Demo Pages
This website was designed in collaboration between the Klezmer Archive Project and the web design firm Clearleft in the UK.We are incredibly grateful to Clearleft for turning our vision and technical needs into a stunning visual design that will grow as our site expands. One of Clearleft's founders is Jeremy Keith, who created The Session, a community website dedicated to Irish music.Our thinking about the Klezmer Archive as a gathering place for contemporary klezmer musicians was deeply influenced by The Session, and our work is inspired by the thriving community that uses it as a site for discovery, discussion, and documentation. Clearleft is a champion of simple, standards-driven, and accessible web development, which matched our technical needs well. They also built on the design work from the KMDMP NEH Scholarly Editions grant by Cory Rockliff, and user experience research with klezmer community members and the KA team led by Schyler VerSteeg. The result is a visual design language that fit our brief to be serious without being stuffy, and that is able to visually organize the large amounts of data that will be available about tunes and people found in the archive space.
Read more about our collaboration with Clearleft in their case study.
Visual Design and Web Components: Clearleft
Klezmer Archive Project team: Clara Byom, Christina Crowder, Max Rothman, Dan Kunda-Thagard
Web Implementation Support: Atira Chaya