Welcome to Caravan Orchestra & Choir 2024!
With the first edition in 2017 and only one gap year due to Corona in 2020, Caravan is now in its 7th year in bringing together young musicians from different traditions and backgrounds with the common goal of the exploration of East European Jewish and East Mediterranean and Middle Eastern music traditions. Every year, we build a learning community that relies on curiosity, transcultural experience and a general understanding of friendship and partnership. We invite you to become a member of this unique community. All instrumentalists and singers who live in Germany or Israel (independently of your nationality) are invited to apply!
What to expect from your participation in Caravan? In the summer of 2024, we will look at the connection between Yiddish (East-European Jewish) music and musics that derive from the Ottoman heritage of Greece and Turkey. We have found a wonderful shared repertoire (instrumental melodies, songs, dances) of these traditions and will study their common heritage and their own musical live in different cultures in Europe and Asia minor. We will learn a lot of music by ear and improvisation will play a major role in our music making. The faculty consists of renowned practitioners of Yiddish, Turkish, Greek and Ottoman traditions with decades of teaching expertise in projects like Caravan. Please click this link to apply for Caravan Orchestra & Choir 2024.
Application deadline is May 7th, 2024 at midnight.
The 2024 Caravan Orchestra and Choir will take place from July 26 in the morning to August 11 in the evening (beginning date is approximate, end date is definite; stay tuned for updates). We will spend the entire time together in Weimar during Yiddish Summer Weimar.
While we will sing in many languages, English will be the main language of communication.
We will ask a 200 EUR fee for participation in Caravan Orchestra & Choir. In return, we will cover your travels, tuition with great teachers, some food, and we will – hopefully with your help – find accommodation for participants.
For participants living in Weimar: please get in touch if you can offer accomodation for fellow band members from Haifa or Germany. In these cases, we can waive the participation fee for you.
There is an age limit of 26 years, so you should be born after August 11th, 1997. However, if you are older than that, please apply anyway and we’ll try to make your participation possible somehow.
If you have any questions please get in touch with project managers Andreas or Anna:
andreas.schmitges@othermusicacademy.eu or +49 177 6017686 (WhatsApp/Telegram)
anna.gruenhardt@othermusicacademy.eu
And here is the faculty (more faculty members to be appointed soon) for Caravan Orchestra & Choir 2024:
Polina Shepherd (artistic director) was born in a Russian Jewish family in Novosibirsk. Whilst living in Tatarstan, Central Russia in the 1980-1990s, she was one of the visible young Jewish activists during her student years, just as the Jews of Soviet Union began to turn their focus back to their roots. Helping her father to bring a Jewish community together in an industrial town Naberezhnye Chelny, recording the remaining memories of Yiddish songs from locals, performing, forming her own band, she learnt about being Jewish in Russia. At the age of 17, she joined Russia′s first professional klezmer band after Perestroika, Simcha, with whom she toured the Former Soviet Union, at the same time studying her musical heritage further.
By her early 20s she was a Yiddish choir leader, composer, bandleader, singer, an international touring musician, educator and festival organiser. Having witnessed the phoenix of Jewish culture rising from the ashes of communism and helping it flourish and develop throughout the FSU, she is now part of the international world of Ashkenazi culture.
Now living in the UK, she continues to be an international culture makher, to open this culture and to connect it to the rest of the global village. She taught the Caravan Choir in 2021 and was the artistic director for Caravan Orchestra & Choir in 2022 and 2023. She will again serve as artistic director of Caravan Orchestra & Choir in 2024.
Photo: Burcu Saral
Mehmet Ali Orman (artistic co-director) was born in the small seaside town of Gemlik, Turkey. He grew up immersed in his own culture and with a strong interest in other cultures as well. He began dancing at the age of 7 and started playing clarinet at the age of 15. He attended the İstanbul Technical University Turkish Folk Dance department to in order to make music and dance his profession. He has participated in folk dance and music festivals in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Japan, Lithuania, Denmark, France as both a dancer and a musician.