Project aims

At its simplest, the ensemble forms one option with an Ensemble Performance module with the participating students being assessed primarily on their ensemble performance acceptance(awareness, skills, etc).

The assessment focuses on their contributions to the collective performance of the ensemble in a lunchtime klezmer concert each springtime.

However, through this encounter with a largely unfamiliar musical idiom and related contexts (of performance), we hope that the ensemblists expand their intercultural musical awareness and, in consequence, expand also their sense of themselves as musicians and the ways in which their future studies and working lives might embrace musical and musician possibilities beyond the obvious.

More specifically, through the ensemble experience, we hope that the students develop a good ethnomusicological awareness of this musical idiom, i.e. develop their klezmer understanding. Integral to this, is the experience of the contexts in which klezmer might be situated within the local Jewish communities of Manchester and beyond.

Finally, as the ensemble experience itself draws to a close and many of the musicians continue playing together, we have noted their desire to ‘give something back’ and, for example, contribute to musically-enriched reminiscence sessions in nearby Jewish residential homes.

These wide-ranging objectives have gradually coalesced over the last few years as the initial idea – that it would be fun to play klezmer together in the department – has taken root and grown. We are very pleased by this outcome and very proud of, and wish to signal our appreciation for the effort of, all those MKK klezmorim who have made klezmer at Manchester so vibrant.