About me
Michael Alpert (musicology, vocals, dance) is a National Heritage Fellow of the United States and a pioneering figure of the international renaissance of East European Jewish music and Yiddish culture since its beginnings in the 1970s. He is known worldwide for his solo and ensemble work with Brave Old World, Itzhak Perlman, Theodore Bikel, Daniel Kahn, Frank London and many others. A native Yiddish speaker, multi-instrumentalist, scholar and educator, Alpert is a foremost traditional Yiddish singer and composer of new Yiddish songs and a leading researcher and teacher of Yiddish dance. An important link to Old World Jewish musicians, he has played a key role in the transmission of Yiddish culture to new generations. His ethnomusicological fieldwork archive resides at the US Library of Congress, and he is translator and co-editor (with Mark Slobin) of Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, the pioneering 1948 work on klezmer music by Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski. Alpert is affiliated with NYC’s Center for Traditional Music and Dance and has taught at Oxford, Columbia, and Indiana Universities. Hailing from California and New England, he lives on the folksong-rich coast of Scotland with literary scholar Emily Finer and two mist-shrouded cats.
