Yale Strom to perform “IN THE MEMORY OF…” with the Carei String Quartet at New Paltz

NEW PALTZ – Klezmer violinist and ethnographer, Yale Strom, will perform his newest Jewish piece, IN THE MEMORY OF… with the Carei String Quartet on April 5 at 8:00 p.m. in McKenna Theatre located on the campus of the State University of New York at New Paltz. There will be a pre-concert discussion at 6:30 p.m. in the same theatre. Tickets, available at the door, are $8 general admission, $6 seniors, SUNY New Paltz faculty and staff, and $3 students.

IN THE MEMORY OF… is based upon melodies from a 1931 cantor’s book Strom found in the abandoned “Mare” synagogue during his invitation to participate in the world music festival in Satu Mare in 2008. This composition is dedicated to the Jews of Romania and Hungary that perished in the Holocaust. Following the performance of IN THE MEMORY OF… Strom will perform klezmer tunes from Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountain regions.

George Varga, music critic of the San Diego Union-Tribune, comments about Strom as “An award-winning musician, author, filmmaker and scholar, this maverick does so many things with such great skill and vision that he’s in a league of his own.”

Yale Strom pioneered among revivalists in conducting extensive field research in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans among the Jewish and Rom communities. Initially, his work focused primarily on the use and performance of klezmer music among these two groups. Gradually, his focus increased to examining all aspects of their culture, from post-World War II to the present. From more than two decades and seventy-five research expeditions, Strom has become the world’s leading ethnographer-artist of klezmer music and history.

Since Strom organized his first band, Hot Pstromi (1981), he has been composing his own New Jewish music, which combines klezmer with Hasidic nigunim, Rom, jazz, classical, Balkan and Sephardic motifs. He composed original music for the Denver Center production of Tony Kushner’s The Dybbuk, and composed all the New Jewish music for the National Public Radio series Fiddlers, Philosophers & Fools: Jewish Short Stories from the Old World to the New, hosted by Leonard Nimoy. Strom’s twelve CDs run the gamut of traditional klezmer to New Jewish music. His latest CDs are Borshy with Bread Borthers and Absolute Klezmer Vol. 2

Yale Strom is currently Artist-in-Residence in the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University.

The concert is sponsored by the Department of Music, the Louis and Mildred Resnick Institute and the Office of Academic Affairs. For additional information call: 845.257.2700 or visit www.newpaltz.edu/music.

Yale Strom playing with Electrocarpathians