The Kay Kaufman Shelemay Syrian-Jewish Collection, 1984 -1993.
Overview
Original field recordings of the Syrian-Jewish genre of pizmonim (paraliturgical hymns) as it has evolved from the early 20th century. Fieldwork was conducted in Brooklyn, NY between 1984 and 1993, and in Brooklyn, NY; Deal, NJ; Mexico City; and Jerusalem between 1986 and 1993.
Dates
- Creation: 1984 -1993.
- Creation: 1984 - 1993 (inclusive).
Language of Materials
Materials in the collection are in Hebrew, Arabic and English.
Conditions Governing Access
Permission to use this collection must be requested from Professor Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Music Department, Harvard University. To request access, navigate to the "COLLECTION INVENTORY" tab of this finding aid to add individual items to your request list.
Extent
1 collection (Sound recordings: 96 audio cassettes, 6 compact discs and one long-playing vinyl disc; one book; two 3.5-inch floppy diskettes.)The Shelemay Syrian-Jewish Collection, mainly on cassette tapes, contains individual oral histories, live music performances, and ancillary recordings collected as part of a research project on the pizmonim (paraliturgical hymns) of the Syrian Jews. The songs are contrafacta, setting newly composed Hebrew texts to borrowed melodies, mainly from the Arab music tradition.
The main field site was Brooklyn, New York, and much of the material was gathered during a team research project Shelemay organized and directed at New York University for three semesters beginning in the fall of 1984, and extending through December 1985. Significant additional material is included from her subsequent independent field work in Brooklyn, NY; Deal, NJ; Mexico City; and Jerusalem, carried out from 1986 through the mid-1990s. The songs collected and discussed date both from centuries of Syrian-Jewish life in Aleppo and from pizmon composition following migration to the United States that began in the early twentieth century.
The collection contains 35 tapes of interviews and 34 tapes of live music sessions. Also included are 27 related commercial and private recordings presented by members of the community to Shelemay and/or team members. Among these are rare historical recordings of deceased pizmon singers in the community, liturgical excerpts, Arab songs that were the source of pizmon melodies, and recordings from the private 78 rpm collection of a Syrian Jewish family who lived for many years in Haiti (includes Arabic, Yiddish, and Haitian songs). Also held is a privately-produced 6-CD set containing pizmonim and liturgical portions performed by Moses Tawil, originally recorded over many years in Brooklyn and remastered as a private collection in Israel. The set contains booklets with detailed notes on Tawil and the history of the collected contents, as well as song texts in Hebrew.
In addition to recordings, the collection includes two 3.5" Maxell MF 2 DD floppy diskettes of interview transcripts and fieldnotes, and a volume of pizmonim intended for singing that was published in Brooklyn, NY in 1983.
Note to Users: For the purpose of this finding aid, transliterations for subject and index terms and proper names, when found, have been standardized according to the OCLC authority file.
Biographical and Historical Note
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and an ethnomusicologist with specializations in musics of Africa, the Middle East, and the urban United States. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1992, Shelemay taught at Columbia, New York, and Wesleyan Universities. At Harvard, she has served as Chair of the Department of Music and has been active in interdisciplinary studies across several domains.
Shelemay received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan in 1977. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Radcliffe Institute and the American Academy for Jewish Research. Shelemay has been a Congressional appointee to the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress since 2000 and she was Chair of that Board from 2002 to 2004. She was named the Chair in Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress during August and September, 2007 and in June, 2008. She is also a past president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and edited the seven-volume Garland Library of Readings in Ethnomusicology (1990).
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Shelemay carried out fieldwork and wrote extensively on Ethiopian music and musicians in their North American diaspora. Her monograph Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986, 1989) won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the Prize of the International Musicological Society. A second book entitled A Song of Longing. An Ethiopian Journey (1991) detailed her years abroad as well as the unanticipated impact that the encroaching Ethiopian Revolution had on her life and research goals. Recordings and accompanying materials from her research on Orthodox Ethiopian church music are held in the Archive of World Music as The Kay Kaufman Shelemay Collection of Ethiopian Music.
In the mid-1980s Shelemay carried out an ethnographic project among Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, NY which resulted in a large collection of field recordings and interviews being deposited in the Sephardic Archives in Brooklyn. The history of that team research project, ethnographic details, and a wealth of other materials are found in articles and in her book Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992). At the end of the initial project, her continued interest in the tradition led to additional research through 1993 that produced the interview and performance recordings housed in this collection.
Arrangement
- Series 1. Interviews
- Series 2. Live Music Sessions
- Series 3. Commercial and Privately Produced Audio Recordings
- Series 4. Printed material, interview transcripts and fieldnotes
Physical Location
Harvard Depository.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
The collection was given by Kay Kaufman Shelemay to the Harvard Music Library, Archive of World Music in June 2010.
Processing Information
Collection processed by Peter Laurence and Donna Morales Guerra, in consultation with Kay Kaufman Shelemay. Finding aid encoded by Peter Laurence and Donna Morales Guerra.
Genre / Form
Geographic
Topical
- Title
- Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. The Kay Kaufman Shelemay Syrian-Jewish Collection, 1984 - 1993. A Finding Aid
- Author
- Archive of World Music, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard College Library
- Language of description
- eng
- EAD ID
- mus00016
Repository Details
Part of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Repository
The Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library is the primary repository of musical materials at Harvard. The Music Library’s collecting mission is to serve music teaching and research programs in the Music Department and throughout the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In addition, it supports the musical needs of the broader Harvard community as well as an international scholarly constituency. We collect books, musical scores, serial titles, sound recordings and video formats, microforms, and rare and archival materials that support research in a wide variety of musical disciplines including historical musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, composition, and historically informed performance practice, as well as interdisciplinary areas related to music. The special collections include archival collections from the 19th, 20th and 21st century.
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