Once Upon a Time the Fire Burned Brighter

Panel Discussion Co-sponsored by Ayin Press Admission: Free Watch the video

Scholar and musician Jeremiah Lockwood has created musical projects engaging with styles ranging from cantorial music to Piedmont blues. For his forthcoming release, Once Upon a Time the Fire Burned Brighter: Ballads from the Yiddish Gothic, Lockwood has turned to Yiddish folksongs for inspiration. The project reimagines Yiddish ballads which Lockwood describes as marked by "erotic melancholy" and "morbid ideation," recasting them for Lockwood's own singing and guitar playing alongside bandmate Ricky Gordon's drumming. Once Upon a Time the Fire Burned Brighter: Ballads from the Yiddish Gothic was produced in collaboration with Ayin Press, and will be released along with a multimedia Ayin Press folio. Composed of audio, video, visual, and textual components, the folio will offer opportunities to deepen and expand the experience of this music and its historical contexts.

Join YIVO for a conversation with Lockwood led by journalist and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen exploring the Yiddish folksong tradition, Yiddish music today, and Lockwood's new arrangements. The presentation will culminate in a video-premiere of one of the songs.

About the Participants

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. He is the founder of the band The Sway Machinery and is currently a Yale Institute of Sacred Music Fellow. His work engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present.

Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist and playwright in New York City. Her ‘Rokhl’s Golden City’ column began appearing in Tablet in 2017, the only regular feature in the world dedicated to new Yiddish culture in all its iterations. Her op-eds on feminism, sociology, and Jewish life appear in newspapers all over the world. She was a 2019-2020 14th Street Y LABA fellow, for which she wrote Shtumer Shabes (Silent Sabbath), a black comedy about the dangers of ethnography and human experimentation. Kafrissen was the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Dreaming in Yiddish award.