Concert: At Home in Yiddish
The Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture presents
At Home in Yiddish
A concert with Miryem-Khaye Seigel & Hankus Netsky
Sunday, November 19, 2023
3:00-4:30 p.m.
Sing Man & Florence Lee/Annette Kaufman Rehearsal Hall, Hamel Music Center, 740 University Avenue
Free and Open to the Public
We’re happy to promote this concert our friends at The Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture are presenting at The Mead Witter School of Music‘s Hamel Music Center. Yiddish songs convey the meaning of home in a myriad of ways – from wandering, to longing for a real or imagined homeland, to adapting to new homes, to sustaining a portable home through language and culture. Join Miryem-Khaye Seigel and Hankus Netsky for a concert exploring Yiddish songs of home — from the heartfelt to the humorous – by two of the foremost interpreters of Yiddish song today.
Miryem-Khaye Seigel is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, recording artist, actor, and researcher in Yiddish culture who “exemplifies the attempt to bring a centuries-old language and culture into the contemporary world” (The New York Times). She has performed throughout the U.S. and internationally, frequently appearing with Shane Baker (Royter Kuter Teater), Hankus Netsky‘s Hebrew National Salvage, and with many other luminaries of the Yiddish and klezmer scene. Her CD of original and adapted songs is “Toyznt tamen=A thousand flavors”. Miryem-Khaye received YIVO’s Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellowship for her research project “The Broder Singers: Forerunners of the Yiddish Theater” and a Folks Arts Apprenticeship to study with master Yiddish song teacher and songwriter Joshua Waletzky. She is co-editor (with Alyssa Quint) of Women on the Yiddish Stage (Legenda, 2023) and a member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project.
A multi-instrumentalist, composer, and ethnomusicologist, Dr. Hankus Netsky is co-chair of New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Musical Arts Department, founder and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and former Vice President for Education at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA. He has composed extensively for film, theater, and television, collaborated closely with Itzhak Perlman, Robin Williams, Joel Grey, Theodore Bikel, Robert Brustein, Eden MacAdam-Somer, Rosalie Gerut, and Robert Pinsky, and produced numerous recordings, including ten by the Klezmer Conservatory Band. He has taught at McGill University, Hampshire College, Wesleyan University, Hebrew College, and for Silkroad’s Global Musician Workshops. His essays on Jewish music have been published by the University of California Press, the University of Pennsylvania Press, Indiana University Press, the University of Scranton Press, Hips Roads, and the University Press of America. Temple University Press published his book Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Jewish Philadelphia in 2015.
We’ll be at the concert with a display of materials from Seigel and Netsky, as well as other items from our collections having to do with Yiddish song–including the Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings and our Yiddish Sheet Music Collection.
