Buchpräsentation mit Zisl Slepovitch (New York)

Sofia Magid’s musical ethnographic collection in the context of the ‚Northern‘ (Litvak) Ashkenazic Jewish musical style

Zisl Slepovitch (New York, USA) offers an insight into the topic of the musical style of the Litvak (North-Eastern European) musical style (or styles). The material has been historically poorly collected and researched, albeit in the 2000s through the present there have been attempts to systematize and theorize on the subject. Having conducted extensive fieldwork and archival research together with Nina Stepanskaya in the early 2000s, Zisl Slepovitch has additionally transcribed and published nearly half of the Soviet ethnomusicologist Sofia Magid’s recordings of the instrumental Jewish (klezmer) music in South-East Belarus and Volyn oblast in Ukraine in the 1920s and 30s, which along with scarcely available other research (specifically that by Walter Zev Feldman) helps understand key characteristics of the long-gone Litvak musical tradition.

Slepovitch’s 2024 folio Musical Treasures from Sofia Magid’s Jewish Ethnographic Collection, Volume 1 will be available for purchase after the presentation.

Zisl Slepovitch (composer, woodwinds, sound design) is a native of Minsk, Belarus, a New Yorker since 2008. He is a Jewish music scholar (Belarusian State Academy of Music), composer, a multi-instrumentalist klezmer, classical, and improvisational musician (woodwinds, keyboards, vocals); a music and Yiddish educator. Slepovitch is a founding member of the critically acclaimed groups Litvakus and Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble, a regular contributor to the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, a Musician-in-Residence at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, a pianist and music coordinator at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York. Slepovitch’s credits include Defiance movie, Eternal Echoes album (Sony Classical), Rejoice with Itzhak Perlman and Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot (PBS), and Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish (off-Broadway).