Welcome to Caravan Orchestra & Choir 2025!
With its first edition in 2017 and only one gap year due to Covid in 2020, Caravan is now in its 8th year bringing together young musicians from different traditions and backgrounds with the common goal of exploring East European Jewish,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 (regardless of your nationality) are invited to apply!
What to expect from your participation in Caravan? In the summer of 2025, we will continue to explore the connection between Yiddish (East European Jewish) music and musics that derive from the Ottoman heritage, including Arabic music, which will be taught by veteran members of Caravan. We have found a wonderful shared repertoire (including instrumental melodies, songs, and dances) between these traditions and will study their common heritage as well as their individual musical lives in different cultures in Europe, the Levant, and Asia Minor. We will learn a lot of music by ear, and improvisation will play a major role in our music making. The teaching faculty (see below) consists of renowned practitioners of Yiddish, Turkish, and Ottoman traditions with decades of teaching expertise in projects like Caravan.
The 2025 Caravan Orchestra and Choir will take place from July 28 in the morning to August 18 in the afternoon. We will spend the first week of our time together at the beautiful Volksmusikakademie in Freyung, Bavaria and the second part in Weimar during Yiddish Summer Weimar.
Apply by clicking HERE!
Application deadline is April 27th, 2025.
Volksmusikakademie Freyung
While we will sing in many languages, English will be the main language of communication.
We will ask a 100 EUR fee for participation in Caravan Orchestra & Choir. In return, we will cover your travels, tuition with great teachers, all of the food in Bavaria and most of it in Weimar, and we will – hopefully with your help – find accommodation for participants in Weimar. There is an age limit of 30 years, so your birthday should be after August 18th, 1995. However, if you are older than that, please apply anyway and we’ll try to make your participation possible somehow.
For participants living in Weimar: please get in touch if you can offer accommodation for fellow band members from Haifa or Germany. If so, we can waive the participation fee for you.
If you have any questions, please get in touch with the project manager, Anna Grünhardt
(anna.gruenhardt@othermusicacademy.eu). For urgent matters (only!) please contact the project director Andreas on WhatsApp/Telegram: +49 177 6017686
And here is the faculty for Caravan Orchestra & Choir 2025:
Photo: Shendl Copitman
Polina Shepherd was born in a Russian Jewish family in Novosibirsk. While 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 the Soviet Union began to turn their focus back to their roots. By helping her father to bring a Jewish community together in the industrial town of Naberezhnye Chelny, recording the remaining memories of Yiddish songs from locals, performing, and forming her own band, she learned 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, while also 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 helped 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 committed to opening this culture and connecting it to the rest of the global village. She taught the Caravan Choir in 2021 and has been the artistic director of Caravan Orchestra & Choir since 2022.
stic director for Caravan Orchestra & Choir since 2022.
Photo: Anton Tal
Tayfun Guttstadt (D/TUR; Ney and other instruments) is a multi-instrumentalist, producer and singer from a Turkish-German family, born in Hamburg. He obtained his B.A. in Musicology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Hamburg with a thesis on the tuning system of Ottoman Classical Music.
In 2016, Tayfun moved to Berlin and completed an M.A in Religion & Culture at the Humboldt University Berlin. Since then, he has become an established part of the music scene in Germany and beyond, playing with names such as Yinon Muallem, Özlem Taner, Yair Dalal, Alan Bern, Wassim Mukdad, Betin Güneş, Danai Loukidi, Milad Khawam, Daniel Kahn and many more.
He is also well known for his workshops on Makam music, which he has presented at the Barenboim-Said Akademie, Yiddish Summer Weimar, Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, and the Berlin Exploratorium, among others.
His debut album „tarâpzâde“, in which he blends modern hiphop with classical Turkish music, was just released and has already gained much attention.
Photo: Mark Wylie
Abigale Reisman (USA; violin)
With over 15 years of experience playing klezmer music, Abigale Reisman has established herself as an expressive and thoughtful fidl player with a lot to say. She is particularly interested in making her violin sound like the human voice and connecting her playing to the rhythms and accents of the Yiddish language. Abigale is a performer, composer, and arranger with the International Jewish Music Festival award winning band, Ezekiel’s Wheels Klezmer Band. She regularly performs in a duo with renowned klezmer scholar and performer Hankus Netsky. Abigale is also a co-founder of Thread Ensemble, an experimental trio that creates music out of interactions with their audiences, and a member of Tredici Bacci, which was featured in Rolling Stone’s“10 Artists You Need to Know: November 2016.” Abigale earned her Bachelor’s degree at The Manhattan School of Music in Classical Violin Performance and went on to receive her Master’s degree at The New England Conservatory in Contemporary Improvisation.