More than a year after requesting digital copies from the Library of Congress, I finally received this set of Simon Adler klezmer scores from the 1890s. I suspect these piano arrangements may be the earliest examples of klezmer music published in the United States, or at least the earliest to be copyrighted with the LOC. They predate the other early klezmer score publishers like Wolff Kostakowsky and the Kammen Brothers by decades, and Herman S. Shapiro’s European Jewish Wedding by a few years.
Irene Heskes (1923–1999), the hard-working music historian and cataloguer of Yiddish music, was already on top of this and listed some of these works by Adler in her catalogue. She gives context to the publication of these early scores in another book:
By 1895, copyrights had begun to appear for Yiddish songs, commencing with selections by Goldfaden, Mogulesco, and Zunser. The earhest Yiddish song publishing house in America was Katzenelenbogen and Rabinowitz, a combined enterprise of two Jewish book printers. In rapid order, others appeared on the scene, some also as book and music stores: Theodore Lohr, Meyer Levin, Hebrew Publishing, S. Goldberg, S. Schenker, and Albert Teres. The Hebrew Publishing Company and another company, Jos. P. Katz, soon incorporated most of the other publishers and their holdings.
Irene Heskes, Passport to Jewish music: its history, traditions, and culture, Greenwood Press, 1994. p.197
Adler published with Theodore Lohr company and was very much in the middle of this first wave of publishing, making simplified piano arrangements of songs from Goldfaden plays, religious melodies, and Jewish wedding pieces. The LOC already had many of his Goldfaden scores on its digital collection as well as one of the klezmer scores. In addition to a Kale Bazetsn piece, there are various dances and processionals. Here are links to the scores (minus the theatre pieces), with my new LOC requests linked to my Google Drive:
The second half of the table lists pieces mentioned on the front pages of the other scores, but the LOC could not locate them for me. It’s possible they were never published, never copyrighted, or all copies were lost.
As for Simon Adler himself, I don’t know much about him. A directory of New York lists a musician by that name living at 242 East Broadway in 1889, but aside from that I haven’t been able to find any trace of him in old records or advertisements. If anyone knows more, let me know.
Thanks to Heather at the Library of Congress Performing Arts division for finding and scanning these scores for me.
As an amateur cimbalom player and klezmer fan, I’ve long had a soft spot for Joseph Moskowitz (1879–1954), a Romanian-born cimbalist, prolific recording artist, and colourful character from old New York. In editing his Wikipedia page years ago, I noted that his obituary credited him with having composed at least a hundred melodies. Searching for other compositions by him kickstarted my project to request klezmer scores from the Library of Congress, as I noted in my first blog post and this one about Moskowitz scores from the LOC. We also have quite a lot of material recorded by him, including the 40 or so 78rpm recordings and the LP Cymbalom Melodies he made late in life. But obviously a lot of his work had been lost.
That’s why I was very pleased when, in Union Square in Manhattan last spring, Pete Rushefsky sat me down and told me how he had just returned from the D.C. area, where he had spent hours photographing scores and photos from a newly rediscovered box of Moskowitz materials found in a relative’s attic. (Pete is Executive Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, in addition to being a fellow cimbalom player and Moskowitz megafan.) Pete was scrolling through images on his phone, showing me Moskowitz as a young man in Europe, newspaper clippings, and old handwritten music manuscripts. Very exciting!
The materials themselves were donated to the Library of Congress, which is entirely appropriate. But their priorities are not the same as ours—I could imagine a scenario in which none of us outside of the D.C. area ever see them or hear about them again—and so I think it is good that Pete has put up a preliminary access version of his photographs here at josephmoskowitz.org. The collection is not organized or catalogued, beyond broad categories of image type. But it contains so much priceless old music and ephemera. Here are some of my takeaways about the music and music history side of it. I won’t even get into the photos or his handwritten memoir.
1. There is a lot of great unknown klezmer in here
So much great new-old klezmer music has been uncovered in the last decade, be it Sherry Mayrent’s amazing 78 rpm finds, old Russian Empire and Soviet klezmer digitized as part of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky project, the LOC’s Yiddish American Popular Sheet Music collection, family collections published by people like Dave Levitt and Susan Watts, and so on. We really live in a rich age of rediscovery. I’ve tried to do my part by ordering and making available copyright scores of forgotten material from the LOC, too. We now have access to so much rediscovered music that we don’t need to be sticking to the few dozen tunes known to klezmer revivalists in the 1980s and 1990s. Here at the monthly KlezWest sessions over here in Vancouver, I have been adding pieces by Moskowitz, Israel J. Hochman or Herman S. Shapiro to the usual Brandwein and Tarras tunes we love to play.
This Moskowitz archive is yet another new addition to this era of musical rediscovery. In addition to his restaurant “Muzak” and other eclectic materials, we can find around a hundred klezmer/Romanian pieces. It’s hard to get a clear count, because some have been photographed more than once, and others appear several times in the collection in different drafts or arrangements. If I had to estimate, I would say there are about 40 sârbas (sirbas), 30 horas of various kinds, 30 chusids (basically their name for a freylekhs) and 10 bulgars. There are also waltzes, tangos, doinas, and many untitled pieces that would have to be played to be categorized. Some are known to us from his old recordings, but most are not.
For Greenbaum Wedding, a waltz from Moskowitz’s collection.
I tried to make sense of it in this spreadsheet last year, and I’ve gone back to update it a bit recently as the collection has been put online. I will probably continue to add notes as I play the scores and observe new things.
2. Moskowitz’s Jewish repertoire was extremely Romanian
Or should it say Moskowitz’s Romanian repertoire was extremely Jewish?
I’ve been working on a talk about golden age New York klezmer composition and repertoire to give at Klezcadia in June. It made me think once again about the way in which the music industry apparently worked to homogenize old New York klezmer into a common sound. Back in the first decades of the 20th century, New York klezmer musicians from diverse regions of origin played together in orchestras for hire and the idea of klezmer we know from old recordings was created. This sound was brassy, clarinet-centric and tended towards music from Southern Ukraine and Moldova, full of bulgars, freylekhs and zhoks. But other artists seem to have had their niche outside this general trend, and Moskowitz was one of them. Although I’m sure he was familiar with their music and played it, his focus here is above all on sârbas, chusids and horas, music from his home region of Romania, filtered through his eclectic tastes picked up elsewhere in Europe and America. Contributing to the tally of sârbas are pieces by Max Leibowitz (who was also born in Romania) and others.
A husid, followed by a short sârba, signed by Max Leibowitz.
Remember, Moskowitz owned a series of Romanian-style restaurants in New York and could play whatever he wanted to please the customers. (To evoke the scene, here is an uncredited appearance in an old Yiddish film.) Although he clearly played weddings and concert stages as well, his main gig for decades was a place he could cultivate a highly specific niche repertoire.
Moskowitz’s recorded output contains plenty of this Romanian-Jewish crossover repertoire, giving us lots of evidence for how he would have performed these types of pieces, and how he would have had them accompanied by a pianist or orchestra. (DAHR lists 6 pieces titled sirba/sarba, but in a few other places he plays untitled ones following a doina or other melody.) Add to this old Romanian music recordings and the output of other Romanian-Jewish klezmer musicians like Abe Schwartz and Max Leibowitz, or Ukraine-Romania borderlands musicians like Israel J. Hochman and Al Glaser, and we have a lot to work with in bringing these scores back to life.
To step out of the old Lower East Side Jewish world for a bit, all of this repertoire is a reflection of the musical milieu Moskowitz grew up with in turn of the century Romania, where many such pieces were being composed and published. (Take a look at the Romanian National Library’s digital collection, and do a search for sirba, sarba, hora etc.) A few of his recordings, like Nunta Taraneasca (1916) are more straightforward performances of those kinds of published folk music suites. Someone with a finer ear for this music could probably do a fascinating study on Moskowitz’s compositions in this style and what differentiates them, if anything, from the pieces from back home.
One of the many sârbas in the Romanian National Library’s digital collection.
3. The collection is a total mess
This is not a knock on Pete, who graciously photographed and made available this collection for all of us to access. But there’s no denying that, from an archival or casual use standpoint, the archive is still in a relatively unstructured and cluttered state. Contents have not been fully assessed, listed, or even cleaned up from the original photographing session. There are duplicates and junk files. We just have to work with that for now. Hopefully over time an effort will be made to catalogue and structure this archive into something a bit more usable, especially now that a professional archive (the LOC) holds the originals.
But there is another way in which it is a beautiful mess: they are just things Moskowitz collected over the years and threw into a box. Compare Dave Tarras’ intentionally curated collection he donated to YIVO. That collection does not contain messy drafts, notes to himself, abandoned materials and so on. In Moskowitz’s messy box of scores we can see on the page just how he developed some of his pieces, either by taking a snippet and expanding it into a hora, or by writing and rewriting a piece, or by the way his favourite compositions appear several times in different arrangements.
A piece, maybe a sârba, written and rewritten by Moskowitz.
4. We can see Moskowitz’s musical community
As someone trying to do historical research into the relatively closed, undocumented and forgotten world of old New York klezmer, these papers are a great glimpse into who Moskowitz was playing with and for, who he hired and who hired him. We see signatures by other musicians, instructions for them by Moskowitz, and his notes to his copyists. We see performance instructions for himself or his pianists, including occasionally customer requests for a particular piece.
Compare it to the Tarras archive at YIVO which I mentioned above. That collection is relatively tidy, donated by Tarras who curated it to say “this is who I was, this was my music.” We see almost nothing of the many other people involved in his musicmaking, and the scores are the final product of a process of drafting and refinement. Not so for Moskowitz’s accidental archive.
And then there are the names of old New York klezmer people, known and unknown. The biggest set is this booklet sent to him by Chaim “Hymie” Millrad (1882–1971), a klezmer bassist & composer born in Mogilev. This set of 10 bulgars and chosids contains most of the pieces Millrad copyrighted with the LOC, but also a few others.
Cover of a booklet of original tunes sent by klezmer bassist Chaim “Hymie” Millrad to Moskowitz, with a dedication.Two bulgars by Hymie Millrad in Moskowitz’s archive.
The next most common name is Max Leibowitz, who I’ve mentioned above a few times already, fellow Romanian immigrant musician and recording artist who himself tried to get into the Romanian-Jewish steakhouse restaurant business as well. A few pieces initialed M.L. in the collection might be him too. And we find pieces by minor figures from that era, like the Galician-born violinist-bandleaders Sigmund Goldring (1888–1947) and Beresh Katz (1879–1964), or Polish-born vaudeville musician Nat Kornspan (1878–1949). Other names on klezmer pieces are unknown to me: Hershkowitz, Schuster, Himmelbrand and Gold. Even the point of the names is not always clear, is it saying this person composed it, or he was playing it with this person, or the person requested it? And so on.
The unknown musician Isidore Moscovitz, who I wrote a blog post about before, is also in here with some of the same pieces he copyrighted with the LOC, including a published version I hadn’t seen before.
A published score of Romanian-style dances by Isidore Moscovitz.
Some of the scores involve people Joseph recorded with, like his longtime pianist Max Yussim, who has an arrangement of Kol Nidre in here, or the well-known bandleader Alexander Olshanetsky (1892–1946) who Moskowitz recorded with in the late 1920s. There’s an arrangement by him of one of Moskowitz’s compositions, a waltz titled Salika.
Finally, I haven’t mentioned them yet, but there are 3 booklets containing 40 of Moskowitz’s compositions arranged for piano late in his life by a guy called Tony Charuha. They were clearly intended for publication. They are titled Rumanian Dances, Folk Dances, and Israeli Dances, although really this is just all Moskowitz’s typical Romanian-Jewish stuff he had been performing and composing for decades. We find a few of his greatest hits as well as many pieces which don’t appear anywhere else.
One of Moskowitz’s dances I’ve heard him play on a radio appearance, rebranded here as an Israeli Dance for Purim.
5. Even the corny restaurant music arrangements are fun
The last thing I wanted to mention is that a lot of the scores are his arrangements of popular or cosmopolitan pieces he was playing for a broader audience than Romanian-Jewish immigrants. This isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been listening to his old recordings for a while now; some of his best recordings are things like Operatic Rag and Argentine Dance (both from 1916).
His written arrangements here may be more interesting for cimbalom players like me, but I encourage people to take a look at them and try them out too. They contain Russian, American, German, etc. compositions which he was clearly having fun with while appealing to a broad audience.
Moskowitz’s cimbalom and piano arrangement of Ivan Vasiliev’s famous Russian song Two Guitars, complete with cues to switch cimbalom sticks.
Thanks for reading to the end, and feel free to tag me or get in touch if you end up performing or recording materials from this archive. I would love to hear about it.
detail from Louis Dubrow Kolomeika (1920) from LOC
My first post on here two years ago was about where to find old klezmer music in the U.S. Library of Congress collection. Back when I was trying to get a handle on what is out there, I came across a lot of references to 1920s Ukrainian music which was copyrighted by immigrant Jewish musicians in New York City. I was curious, but I didn’t order many of them, wanting to focus on more “Jewish” music first and Romanian music second. But now, I want to explain the process of how those kinds of scores (and later scores by immigrant Ukrainian musicians) can be obtained even if, like me, you aren’t located in the U.S. and can’t afford a plane trip to Washington D.C.
What scores?
Prior to the 20th century, music publishers and composers in the U.S. submitted scores to the Library of Congress to secure their ownership over music they had composed or arranged, often for the purpose of selling a published version. I believe it was most often a matter of sending a copy of the published music to Washington, where it was stamped and added to that year’s registry of copyrighted music.
Part of Six Pièces Ukrainiennes by Theodore Akimenko, arranged by Stéphane Chapelier and published in Paris in 1925. A rare example of Ukrainian music in the Library of Congress digital collection, it can be accessed here.
With the rise of the recording industry, this practice expanded to also include handwritten music manuscripts (sometimes with lyrics) which were never commercially published. Instead, these documented melodies or performances which were to be recorded on 78 rpm disc: a very basic score with a title matching the recording, and the name of the composer/arranger, with a date and number stamped on it by the copyright office.
Because of this connection between copyright manuscripts and recordings, if the historic recording is already available to us, it’s not exactly a case of uncovering lost music. In fact, the very plain score may be a worse way to learn a dance tune than listening to the recording. But seeing the score and reading the lyrics is still helpful for understanding and performing the music. It can also reveal which artist was behind a particular recording which may have been released under a generic record company orchestra label, or a partner who was involved in the arrangement or industry side of things but was not credited on the disc label.
Part of Der Mesader Kedushen by Gus Goldstein, a music and lyrics copyright document submitted to the Library of Congress in 1923. It contains klezmer wedding music and text in romanized Yiddish for a nostalgic or comic scene. He recorded several versions of this, but I think it corresponds to this one.
In the klezmer world, we’re lucky that the Library of Congress has a special digital collection called the Yiddish American Popular Sheet Music collection, which contains almost 1500 published scores and copyright manuscript scores. Sadly there is no equivalent for Ukrainian music, which is very poorly represented on the LOC’s digital collections (as are most other heritage musics). But the scores exist in paper form and can still be called up and scanned in person, or ordered for a fee by anyone willing to pay. I’ll explain how, but first I want to explain how to know what to look for.
The early Ukrainian folk music recording industry in the U.S.
I won’t try to give a complete accounting of the Ukrainian folk music history of the U.S. I’m just thinking about my corner of it as a fan of old Ukrainian fiddle music and as someone who has been researching immigrant Jewish musicians who recorded for multiple ethnic markets.
Ukrainian Danse No. 706, submitted by Abe Schwartz for copyright in 1920. Available here on the Yiddish American Popular Sheet Music collection.
Ukrainian music scores copyrighted by immigrant Jewish musicians, as with the Abe Schwartz score above, are more accessible than those of immigrant (Christian) Ukrainian musicians from that era. Those Jewish musicians—mini-celebrities of the old New York klezmer world like Schwartz, Naftule Brandwein, and Lt. Joseph Frankel—recorded hopaks, kolomeikes, Ukrainian folk songs, etc. with their Jewish orchestras, often in the same session as recording Jewish dances. In other cases, Ukrainian-born Jewish singers like Meyer Kanewsky recorded Ukrainian-language songs under a pseudonym, which were sold to a Ukrainian audience.
Abe Schwartz in particular copyrighted hundreds of non-Jewish dance tunes and songs due to his role at Columbia Records after WWI, leading bands playing ethnic music for multiple markets but also in identifying and bringing on new talent. In the Max Leibowitz vs. Columbia Records court case (which I hope to write about another time), it’s made very clear that dance melodies were identified as upcoming recordings, and Schwartz sent in the paperwork and sold the rights to the record company. In most cases he had not composed them and was simply trying to give the company a strong claim to what they were recording.
From the little I understand of the Ukrainian music industry in New York, non-Jewish bandleaders and soloists started to become more prominent by the mid-1920s. Pawlo Humeniuk made his first record in 1925, soon followed by the vocalist Eugene Zukowsky and others. A wider range of Ukrainian music was recorded by these musician than their Jewish predecessors, due to the particular tastes of the artists and audience: comic scenes in Ukrainian, village fiddle music, etc. But I wouldn’t see the two trends as being completely distinct or in competition. Industry middlemen figures like Schwartz seem to have worked with, and submitted copyrights for, Ukrainian recording artists well into the 1930s and 1940s and many of the recordings of the Ukrainian artists found a market among immigrant Jews as well.
How to identify and order scores
There are a few steps to identifying and ordering copyright music manuscripts from the LOC. Basically:
Identify a 78rpm recording, type of piece, arranger or recording artist
Search it in the U.S. copyright registers
Make a note of the composer, title and number and fill out a digitization request form with the Library of Congress
Weeks later, pay the final digitization fee and get the scanned scores through a filesharing service.
Identifying a Recording or Artist to search for
Because of the cost and staff time involved, I recommend doing a wide search to figure out what exists, and then narrowing it down to a dozen or two scores to order at a time. Here are some places to look:
Music streaming platforms & old recordings
Hearing digitized versions of 78rpm records and poking around online is exactly how I got onto this whole thing of ordering klezmer copyright manuscripts. I don’t think there’s one centralized place to find all of the Ukrainian American 78rpm discs digitized and streamable. Aside from commercial streaming platforms, reissue CDs like Ukrainian Village Music, and youtube, there is UAlberta’s digital collection of old Ukrainian music and the Internet Archive’s Ukrainian audio selections. Like I said earlier, the title of the 78 rpm side usually matches the copyright because of the business reason for submitting it. Just remember that they have to have been recorded in the U.S., not Canada, the U.S.S.R., etc.
Record Company catalogues
Record company catalogues were pamphlets or booklets sent out in the 78 rpm era so people or stores could know which new records were available for order. There were general annual catalogues by label (Columbia, Victor, etc.) and each one also put out monthly pamphlets aimed at particular ethnic markets: Jewish, Romanian, Greek, Ukrainian, etc.
A Columbia Records pamphlet from 1926 listing new Ukrainian market discs. From the Cape Breton University collection, it can be accessed here.A sampling of new Ukrainian discs from the Columbia Records 1928 supplement of new Ukrainian and Russian discs. From the Cape Breton University collection, the rest can be viewed here.
There isn’t one centralized place to view all of them. But, because they were mailed out all over the place, they appear in many digital collections. The New York Public Library has this excellent LibGuide which lists many places to find them. In these lists you can get an idea of what was out there.
If you can find it in a library, Spottswood’s Ethnic Music on Records Vol. 2: Slavic will also have a very thorough listing. There is a partial preview on Google books.
Part of page 1083 from Spottswood’s Ethnic Music on Records Vol. 2 showing some Humeniuk recordings. Source: Google books.
The information is similar to DAHR, which sources a lot of its info from Spottswood.
Searching in the Copyright Registers to see if it exists there
After you get an idea of what you want to look up, you have to find the entries in the copyright ledgers, thick books which were printed several times a year by the U.S. copyright office. Music copyrights were listed in their own volumes separately from other types of items. The entries are generally written in the latin alphabet (which can cause problems with transliteration) and are organized alphabetically by the title of the copyrighted piece. Not every recording is copyrighted in this way, especially if they were a redo or imitation of something which had already been recorded and copyrighted. Ignore the renewal or recording notices; you want to look for the original copyright submission which will have numbers like E 652946 or E unp. 73121.
Sample entries from page 530–1, Catalog of Copyright Entries, New Series. Part 3: Musical Compositions 1933. An Abe Schwartz-copyrighted Kolomeyka with lyrics presumably not written by him (a Romanian Jewish immigrant) mixed in alphabetically with unrelated pieces. Source: Internet Archive.
Although they exist in print form and on databases like HathiTrust, in my opinion the easiest place to search old U.S. copyright registers is on the Internet Archive. There’s a special collection called Copyright Registers where they are all digitized and searchable. Select “search text contents” and start looking up keywords. It will highlight the digital results in each book for you. Keep these open in a tab if you want them because it’s easier to copy and paste from this search pane later.
Search results for Humeniuk in Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1927 Music For the Year 1927 New Series. Source: Internet Archive.
When I was looking for klezmer copyright scores, I also searched for typical dance genres, keywords (Jewish, wedding, etc), likely typos and alternate spellings, and so on. Such keywords might bring up other similar music copyrights you weren’t aware of (including ones that never ended up being recorded). And it’s worth spelling transliterated terms in multiple ways. For example, we get different results by searching for kolomyjka, kolomeyka, and kolomeika.
Ordering the scores, payment & receipt
When you have a list of scores, you have to contact the LOC’s Duplication Services. (Or, if you live in the D.C. area you can go and scan them in person for free at the Performing Arts Reading Room, but you’d have to negotiate with them in advance as the materials are not held on-site.)
Download this PDF Duplication Services Order Form and fill out a new form for each 10 items you request. Then email the PDFs to DuplicationServices@loc.gov and it’ll get the process started. With an official request, the Duplication Services will call up the boxes and look for specific scores for scanning. I recommend Digital Photocopy (PDF) which costs $1.50 per page (plus research fees if applicable); you don’t need expensive high resolution scans for this purpose. All the scans I got at that quality were very legible. In some cases the initial estimate was much more than the final cost I was asked to pay.
A sample order where I’m copy and pasting some of the Humeniuk copyrights into the form, putting the copyright number in the first field and selecting 1 PDF Scan for each one. (Internet Archive/Library of Congress)
They may email you to ask for clarification, and with the 3 times I’ve ordered, it’s taken weeks for them to get back to me with the actual files. They generally can’t find all of the scores; they just charge less and indicate which ones they couldn’t find. For my three orders, I paid $38 for my first order of 15 items, and $155 and $185 for my later, much larger orders of ~45 items. The last one was in early 2024 so the price may have changed by the time you try it. The files are sent by a time sensitive dropbox-type service called Media Shuttle.
Conclusion
It’s a strange process, but I think this method is worthwhile for digging up old folk music scores which were never published and are spread out among random boxes in remote storage somewhere. It’s especially helpful when trying to piece together a song or comedic performance in dialect which you’ve only heard on an old scratchy recording. But I’ve also found it interesting to see how the klezmers from back then wrote down their handwritten scores, even if I’ve heard the recording many times. It makes me see the shape of the melody in a new way.
The examples I gave here were for Ukrainian fiddle music, but I think the same approach could be used for other types of heritage music which were recorded and copyright in the U.S.
