Christina Crowder
Klezmer Accordion
Performance — Research — Teaching
Coaching — Music Direction
Christina is an accordionist with thirty years of experience as a researcher, performer and educator in klezmer music and Asheknazic expressive culture.
Christina is the Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute, a digital-first organization founded to support Ashkenazic expressive culture through research, teaching, publishing, and programming. The Institute’s flagship projects, the Klezmer Archive Project (KA), and the Kiselof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP), have been awarded three grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Touring with The Klezmer Institute’s
“Trampled Manuscripts” Artist residencies
The Trampled Manuscripts Artist Residency is a week of immersive programming that connects musicians and audiences to Ashkenazic heritage through Klezmer Institute’s 2020 international community-driven digital humanities project Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP), a treasure trove of newly-available music from 100 years ago. Residencies are designed for each community, featuring a flagship concerts, workshops, lectures, master classes, ensemble coaching, and professional development for culture workers.
Read about past residencies here, and find resources for potential hosts here.
What sets the “Trampled Manuscripts” program apart is its holistic approach to community engagement. Rather than simply presenting historical material in a lecture or solo performance, it offers a collaborative model designed to induce meaningful cultural exchange and artistic growth. Christina’s expertise as both a researcher and performer is crucial to this success – she navigates seamlessly between scholarly insight and practical musicianship, making complex historical material accessible and engaging for both performers and audiences.
Photo: Lloyd Wolf
Photo: Lloyd Wolf
Photo: (left) Jenny Graham; (above) Lloyd Wolf
Our community was enriched and enlivened by Christina Crowder’s community workshop on klezmer music from the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky archive. She transmitted knowledge to seasoned klezmer musicians as well as encouragement and nurturing to budding klezmorim. The following week Crowder performed with some of Portland local legends and the result was a concert that blew the roof off of our venue, Eastside Jewish Commons, with heart-felt music, soulful playing, and finally a series of rhapsodic freylachs that literally lifted people off their chairs and had them line dancing in the aisles. It was as if our community had suddenly joined our ancestors in an exuberant shtetl wedding dance.
performance
Christina is a founding member of Di Naye Kapelye—an ensemble dedicated to researching and performing traditional eastern European Jewish music. Her current projects is the klezmer chamber music ensemble The Zamlers, and she performs regularly with Michael Winograd and the Honorable Mentschen, the Dave Levitt Trio, Susan Watts, Alicia Svigals and many other North American klezmorim.
Teaching & Coaching
Christina has led workshops and coaching sessions in Europe and North America, and has been on faculty at KlezKanada, Yiddish New York, Klezmer Paris, Yiddish Sumer Weimar, Trip To Yiddishland, and Klezmerquerque.
In addition to private lessons and master classes, Christina is an ensemble coaching specialist, with a deep understanding of the roles of different instruments in the klezmer kapelye ensemble, and how folks with different instruments can create idiomatic textures and dance rhythms.
Research
From 1999 to 2001 Christina and her husband John DeMetrick pursued Fulbright grants in Romania, working with elderly violinists who had played music for Jewish communities before the Second World War. The pair made field recordings of those musicians and also pursued archival and library sources for Jewish material and an understanding of the local influences on Jewish musical styles. Christina continues this research with a project to document connections between Jewish, Bessarabian, and Greek music through NYU Abu Dhabi, and she is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute.
Theater
Christina was Music Director and performing artist in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of the Broadway play “Indecent” in 2019, and reprised both roles at he Artist Repertory Theater production in Portland, OR in the winter of 2020.
Workshops
Current workorkshop programming usese the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) corpus to create workshops for instrumentalists and singers at all levels. Vocal workshops center nigunim in the corpus, presenting melodies across a range of emotional qualities, from spiritual longing to joyous celebration.
Instrumental workshops present new tunes and engage participants with decoding handwritten manuscripts and thinking through how to interpret tunes informed by forty years of ongoing klezmer revival.
Ashkenazic Dance for Klezmer Musicians is a full-day or two-day seminar to help musicians understand how rhythm and tempo support the physical impulses for the four main Ashkenazic dance genres through physical movement and playing. This workshop can be arranged as part of a KMDMP residency, or as a standalone event.
I know that all of us were very excited to get to collaborate with you, but, even so, I don’t think we imagined that such a difference could happen in the course of just one rehearsal session. You have an uncanny ability to focus on each of our roles, and to quickly describe just the right “tweak” to allow us to better contribute to the band’s holistic sound and style.
Christina Crowder is truly a master musician and storyteller who brings places and melodies lost to time dramatically to life through weaving a spell of song. She doesn’t tell you about it as much as you feel it in her presence. Here in Ashland, we had a packed house concert of 80 people that were completely held in thrall by the evening (when they were not dancing). Part of Christina’s gift is in teaching and demonstrating the intersection of cultures within cultures that made this music possible in the first place (i.e. the relationships between the Roma, Greek, and Jewish musicians in early 20th century Moldovia). A gift to the Jewish community and beyond.
Klezmer Institute
Christina is the Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute.
Klezmer Institute is a digital-first organization founded to support Ashkenazic expressive culture through research, teaching, publishing, and programming. Ashkenazic expressive culture encompasses the musical and physical expression of eastern European Jewish culture through music, song, and dance. Klezmer Institute projects use digital humanities tools to define and document the unique musical heritage of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe, and to increase communication and collaboration between professional and amateur musicians, dancers, and scholars throughout the world. Klezmer Institute champions Ashkenazic expressive culture through digital preservation and contemporary performance as an important means to understand Jewish culture in the past, and as a springboard to inspire new generations to engage with an essential cultural legacy.
Find out more about Klezmer Institute Projects and Programming!
Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project
Trampled Manuscripts Visiting Artist Residencies & Concerts
Article Library on Ashkenazic Expressive Culture Topics
Archives in Focus Series 2022.