Miksa Eisikovits's Hasidic Jewish folk music collection from Maramures

Max (Miksa, Mihály) Eisikovits (1908-1983), Romanian composer, conductor, musicologist and pedagogue; from 1946 associated with the Conservatory of Music in Cluj-Napoca. In 1938-1939 Eisikovits traveled to Jewish settlements in the Máramaros region of Transylvania (then part of Hungary; currently Maramures, Romania) to collect songs from the area's Hasidic population. Eisikovits sensed that these communities were threatened; today his field notations, comprising some 160 melodies, stand as unique documentation of the music traditions of a culture that was destroyed during the Holocaust. Resuming his career after the war, Eisikovits drew on his collection for a series of folk-based art songs and instrumental compositions; decades after his death his original transcriptions were published in the volume "És a halottak újra énekelnek ..." : Eiskovits Miksa Máramarosi haszid zsidó zenei gyűjtéses (1938-1939) (After all the dead sing again ..." (Miksa Eisikovits's Hasidic Jewish music collection from Maramureş (1938-1939)), edited by Elek Judit (Budapest, 2018). Photocopy of Miksa Eisikovits's (Max Eisikovits) Hasidic Jewish folk music collection from Máramaros (Maramures, Romania) documented in 1938-39. The collection consists of four school music sheet booklets with handwritten scores, annotations, and phonetic, liturgic Hebrew and Yiddish texts. Included are four additional sheets. Miska collected 160 songs during his research in Máramaros, but was unable to capture lyrics for all of them. The collection has been published as "És a halottak újra énekelnek ..." : Eiskovits Miksa Máramarosi haszid zsidó zenei gyűjtéses (1938-1939) / szerkesztette Elek Judit ; a kottsákat megfejtette és digitalizálta Melis László = "After all the dead sing again ..." : Miksa Eisikovits's Hasidic Jewish music collection from Maramureş (1938-1939) / edited by Elek Judit ; the notes have been decoded and digitalized by Melis László. [Budapest] : Dánielfilm, 2018 (M1851 .E47 2018)