The Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has received 12 Jewish cylinder recordings c.1901 from the Chicago-based Thomas Lambert Company, according to a July 6 news release.
These rare recordings are thought to be the oldest surviving recordings of Yiddish music. They join the Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings, a repository of more than 9,000 78 rpm recordings of Yiddish and Jewish music, at the university’s Mills Music Library.
Among the collection is the earliest known performance of the classic song “Rozhkinkes mit Mandlen” (“Raisins and Almonds”), composed by the father of the Yiddish theater Abraham Goldfaden and recorded for Lambert shortly before the composer’s death.
The Thomas Lambert Company began issuing cylinders around 1900. While its catalog of more than 1,000 recordings would eventually reflect only mainstream popular music, 48 of the firm’s first 80 releases were Yiddish. Lambert cylinders are among the most uncommon of all early American sound recordings, and the Yiddish issues are the rarest of all Lamberts.
In partnership with Grammy-award winning Archeophone Records, the institute will reissue the recordings later this year under the title “Attractive Hebrews: The Thomas Lambert Yiddish Cylinders 1901-1904.”
The institute also announced in a July 8 email that it is cancelling this year’s “A Bisele KlezKamp,” the smaller summer version in Madison of the KlezKamp klezmer music/Yiddish culture workshop that used to be held in December in New York State.
According to the announcement, “the effects of the anticipated severe budget cuts to the University of Wisconsin System are already being felt” and the summer event “is an early casualty” of the cuts.
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