Listening in Yiddish: Listening to and Valuing Yiddish Folksong

Somewhat surprisingly, the past decade has been a Golden Age for the Yiddish folksong. With the online publication of the Ruth Rubin Legacy Archive of Yiddish Folksongs in 2018, the launch of the research website Inside the Yiddish Folksong in 2020, the anniversary of ten years of archival work by the Yiddish Song of the Week Blog in 2021, and the planned digitalization of the YIVO Yiddish Folksong Project in 2022, the amount of online resources and field recordings of Yiddish folksongs has virtually exploded. Within the transnational Yiddish and klezmer music scene, new interest in the analysis of field recordings of Yiddish folksong and its unaccompanied performance style has emerged. But how exactly are these old recordings used and listened to by contemporary Yiddish singers? This paper presents ethnomusicological research on listening practices of field recordings of traditional unaccompanied Yiddish folksongs. It is based on ethnographic interviews as well as participant observation in Yiddish singing workshops in North America, Europe and online. How do singers listen and “learn to listen” to these recordings? How is do contemporary Yiddish singers’ voice and singing style depend on the ability to listen and vice versa? And how are these recordings transformed and revalued through these listening practices? Analysis is based on musicological and philosophical theories of listening, Jewish Studies literature on postvernacular Yiddish culture and the sociology of valuing. I argue that listening is both an epistemological and a valuing practice that constitutes the field recording as an artifact of Jewish diasporic heritage, thus working against the historical devaluation of Yiddish cultural heritage in the course of the 20th century. It thus also contributes to further understanding the politics of Yiddish language, music and culture for Jewish Studies.