Web edition of International Hebrew Wedding Music
Welcome! This is a Web edition of International Hebrew Wedding Music, by Wolff N. Kostakowsky, published in Brooklyn in 1916.
The work is an important early collection of klezmer tunes, and has also recently been published in a modern edition as The Ultimate Klezmer. This website is not related to that edition, but is a completely independent publication of the same source material.
I have tried to keep this edition as close as possible in content to Kostakowsky’s original. Any editorial additions or comments are in [square brackets], except that editorial accidentals are in (parentheses).
Source material
There is only one freely available digital copy of the book that I know of currently. It is available through IMSLP at https://imslp.org/wiki/International_Hebrew_Wedding_Music_(Kostakowsky%2C_Wolff_N.). Thanks to allen lutins of KlezmerGuide for scanning this version!
The National Library of Israel also used to have a copy available at http://aleph.nli.org.il/nnl/dig/books/bk002451648.html, but it seems to have gone away, despite the fact that the link at that page looks like it should work. The National Library did not respond to my inquiries about the current availability of the scans. If anyone else gets a response out of them, please let me know and I’ll update this page!
Table of contents
Kostakowsky did not consistently use section headings for different types of tunes, but he did number tunes more or less sequentially within what he presumably considered categories. I’ve put each category into its own section below, and the numbers in the filenames and tables of contents correspond to Kostakowsky’s tune numbers.