Song Workshop for singers, instrumentalist & arrangers
Jul 30 – Aug 5 @Musikschule
10 a.m. – 1 p.m. & 3 – 6 p.m.
With Naomi Cohn Zentner, Sveta Kundish, Esti Kenan-Ofri, Sasha Lurje (Co-Coordinator), Alan Bern (Co-Coordinator), Yair Dalal
Artists-in-Residence: Susan Ghergus & Efim Chorny
This year's Song Workshop offers an unparalleled opportunity to explore both traditional and newly composed vocal music of three major Jewish cultures: Ashkenazic (Yiddish), Sephardic (Ladino) and Mizrahi (Judeo-Arabic). Singers, accompanists and composers/arrangers are all warmly invited to participate in a week of musical discovery and creation.
Our outstanding faculty includes artists of great power and originality who are deeply rooted in historical vocal traditions and forging their own, new paths. We welcome for the first time the wonderful vocalist, percussionist and composer, Esti Kenan-Ofri, a specialist in Sephardic music and creator of new spaces in Israeli music. Also from Israel, we welcome back vocalist, oud and violin master Yair Dalal, a true pioneer of contemporary Judeo-Arabic music in Israel, and Naomi Cohn-Zentner, an inspired and inspiring musicologist whose work reveals previously overlooked connections among Jewish, Arabic and other cultures. Sveta Kundish brings an incredibly multi-faceted life in music and her own exquisite vocal artistry to the mix, with roots in Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English and German traditional, classical and popular vocal traditions, culminating in her completed training as a cantor at the Abraham Geiger College in Berlin. Sasha Lurje, whose vocal work with Forshpil, You Shouldn't Know From It, Dan Kahn and others has established her as a young star in Yiddish music contributes not only her artistry but also expertise in Yiddish traditional singing and superb teaching and organizational skills. Coordinating the workshop together with Lurje will be Yiddish Summer Artistic Director Alan Bern, pianist, accordionist, composer, bandleader and a leading light of the klezmer and Yiddish music revival since the mid-1980s.
Together with you, the participants, we will work in plenary sessions, ensembles, coaching sessions, lectures and jam sessions. We will also reflect on how our different traditions resemble and differ from one another, musically and socially, and how they contribute to issues of Jewish, non-Jewish and Israeli identities. We will not only discover the spaces that already exist for historically informed music-making, we will create some new spaces of our own! We hope you can join us!
This workshop is for vocalists, instrumentalists and composer/arrangers with intermediate to advanced experience in Yiddish, Sephardic or Judeo-Arabic music. We will work both by ear and with written music. If you'd like to discuss whether this workshop is right for you, please contact the workshop's co-coordinator, Sasha Lurje:
SPECIAL TIP: You’re excited about the Song Workshop but you don’t read Yiddish and wish you did? The Beginning Yiddish Workshop is just the thing for you, then! Come to Weimar a week earlier, learn the Yiddish alphabet and the basics of the Yiddish language and go directly into the Song Workshop enriched and empowered by your new knowledge!
Workshop fee: Standard 460 € / Reduced 355 € / Supporter 635 € / Under 18: 180 €
For information about the Standard, Reduced and Supporter fees >> read about
>> Registration