Lecture: Eric Warner on The Yiddish Cylinder Project
The Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture presents
The Yiddish Cylinder Project
Eric Warner
Sunday, April 23, 2023
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Memorial Library, Room 126, 728 State St
Free and Open to the Public
We’re excited to collaborate with our friends at The Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture in presenting Toronto-based music producer Eric Warner sharing his recent project to create new cylinders of Yiddish music. From their description: The Cylinder Project’s mission is to educate, inspire, and motivate audiences to explore their own original cultural stories. Specifically, the Cylinder Project examines how stories, songs and information have been passed down through each generation and their significance to personal and cultural identity. The Cylinder Project explores early sound recordings, linguistics through parallels between melody and cadence in song and how the dissemination of music and stories have rapidly evolved in 120 years. The project focuses on incorporating original sound recordings of music and stories in their original form that are then reworked by present-day musicians and artists. The result is to promote the updated music and language that still preserves the character of the story to the modern listener.
Eric Warner is the founder and President of We Are Busy Bodies, a record label, music management company, and booking agency founded in 2005. Since the late 1990’s he has consulted for a range of record labels, marketing agencies, arts organizations, and operated additional programming initiatives for music organizations. The collective experience and relationships of Warner and We Are Busy Bodies best positions The Cylinder Project to achieve and grow its mandate and objectives. The Cylinder Project is already actively collaborating with globally recognized museums, institutions, and universities to develop its project scope.
Mills Music Library houses the Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings, which includes the Lambert Yiddish Cylinders, the earliest known cylinder recordings of Yiddish music, acquired in 2015. These cylinders were inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019, being deemed worthy of preservation because of their cultural, historic, and aesthetic importance. The digitized audio files of the cylinders are available to hear online via UW Digital Collections. Simply search the Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings for “Lambert,” and you will get all the cylinders in the results. The digitized files are also compiled on Attractive Hebrews: The Lambert Yiddish Cylinders, 1901-1905, a 2016 CD co-produced, annotated, and translated by former Mayrent Institute Director Henry Sapoznik for Grammy Award-winning Archeophone Records, capturing the music of the performers who first brought Yiddish theater to America.
