Svigals
Composer • Violinist • Vocalist
2020 Guest Speaker

Alicia Svigals is the world's leading klezmer fiddler and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, who she co-directed for seventeen years. She has played and composed for violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, playwrights Tony Kushner and Eve Ensler, poet Allen Ginsburg, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, singer/songerwriters Debbie Friedman, Diane Birch, Gary Lucas and Najma Akhtar, and many others. She has appeared on David Letterman, MTV, PBS' Great Performances, on NPR's Prairie Home Companion and Weekend Edition and WNYC’s New Sounds, and on the soundtrack for the L-Word. Svigals was awarded the Foundation for Jewish Culture's annual New Jewish Music Network Music Commission for her original live score to the 1918 film the Yellow Ticket and a Trust for Mutual Understanding grant to bring that work to Poland, and she has been a LABA Fellow and an NEA MacDowell Fellow. Last year she released Beregovski Suite, a CD with jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer exploring klezmer melodies collected in the early 20th century by Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski. She is currently touring the Ancient Law, a cine-concert in collaboration with pianist/composer Donald Sosin, featuring a classic 1923 film in a new restoration.