Screiber Jewish Music Library

Looking for one thing, I found another. Story of my life.

I was looking for information on traditional lullabyes (I'll save what I found for another post). What I found was the Gratz College Screiber Jewish Music library. According to it's website

The Schreiber Jewish Music Library is one of the most extensive collections of its kind in the world. Centered around the Eric Mandell Collection, it includes more than 20,000 books, scores, records, tapes, and compact discs. It encompasses holdings in Jewish liturgy, Yiddish Theater, Ashkenazic hazzanut, Sephardic chants and popular music from America, Europe, and Israel.

If you live near Philidelphia, go visit. If not, check out the Music Samples page. The samples page is just that. A couple of recordings, described well and put online in the Windows Media format, for our pleasure and edification. It looks like a new set of samples goes up once a month and that they keep an archive of a few months. I listened to a variety of tracks including the Sabbath piyyut Ein Keloheinu, the Diaspora Yeshiva Band doing a (slightly disco) version Hakol Yoducha from the morning service, and the Russian composer Joseph Achron's 1914 Hebrew Lullabye.

The lullabye track is, of course, the reason I found the song samples page in the first place.