Welcome to Caravan 2026!
With the first edition in 2017 and only one gap year due to Corona in 2020, Caravan is now in its 9th year in bringing together young musicians from different traditions and backgrounds with the common goal of exploring 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 2026, we will continue to explore 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 life in different cultures in Europe and Asia minor. If you’re curious to see what that looks like on stage, take a look at our concert clips here.
We will learn a lot of music by ear and improvisation will play a major role in our music making. The faculty (see below) consists of renowned practitioners of Yiddish, Turkish, Greek and Ottoman traditions with decades of teaching expertise in projects like Caravan.
The 2026 Caravan Orchestra and Choir will take place from July 25 in the morning to August 17 in the afternoon (beginning date is approximate, end date is definite; stay tuned for updates). We will spend the first week of our time together at a beautiful Music Academy in Germany (exact place to be confirmed soon) and the second part in Weimar during Yiddish Summer Weimar.
If you haven’t participated in this project before, please send us one or two examples of your playing or singing. You can either send one or more internet links, or upload one or more video or audio files in which your singing or playing can be clearly heard.
UPDATE: We have received many wonderful Israeli applications and are still accepting German applications until May 3rd.
Apply by clicking HERE.
Please do not use ChatGPT to write your application. We can tell when it has been used, and it is important to us to get to know you and your motivation and interests, rather than what an AI assumes we want to hear. Thank you!
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, most of your meals, and the accommodation for all Israeli participants. For the German participants who do not live in Weimar, we can help find accommodation, ideally as a guest with other participants in Weimar. Due to the funding, there is an age limit of 30 years, so you should be born after August 16th, 1996. 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 accomodation for fellow band members from Haifa or Germany. In these cases, we can waive the participation fee for you.
If you have any questions, please get in touch with project manager Anna Grünhardt (anna.gruenhardt@othermusicacademy.eu).
For urgent matters (only!) please contact project director Andreas on WhatsApp/Telegram: +49 177 6017686.