Abstract
Butter-lider is a musical setting of prerecorded samples of four Yiddish texts, recited by the writers themselves. I intend for these sounds to showcase the musicality of a language that has previously been stereotyped as a “jargon” and had its cultural products neglected and ridiculed even by its own members. I also wish for this project to investigate the role that recordings and preservationist ideologies have had in redefining Yiddish language and culture across today’s vibrant and ongoing resurgence of interest. In addition to archival research and original composition, this project has required me to analyze and translate the texts. The recordings, made between 1950 and 1965 at Montreal's Jewish Public Library, have been graciously provided by the Yiddish Book Center’s Digital Library of Archival Recordings; the music I have composed is meant to be performed live by a six-member ensemble alongside these recordings. This project will take the words of six modern Yiddish writers at face value to make something radically new. The voices of H. Leivick, Yankev Glatshteyn, Kadya Molodowsky, and Rokhl H. Korn, transmitted through and out of decades of technological time, loom large over the live music. My additions respond to the musicality of their vocal patterns, my interpretations of their texts, and technology’s idiosyncrasies. I hope to facilitate a dialogue, across artistic media, across time and space, between these writers’ unique perspectives, and my own, on what it means to make Yiddish art. I refuse to fall into the elitist and insulting narrative of “elevating” a folk tradition by bringing it to classical music spaces. Rather, I hope to platform and participate within this living culture so that it may reach new audiences and new generations, and to offer another medium, another language, through which to tell Yiddish narratives.