Klezmer in, with, and for the community: A Q&A with Richard Fay
04 Apr 2025
Richard Fay and Daniel Mawson received a Humanities Strategic Civic Engagement Fund (HSCEF) award in 2023 for their project on intercultural musicking in the community.
In 2023, Richard Fay, Reader in Education, and Daniel Mawson, Honorary Research Fellow in Music, received an award from the HSCEF, the Faculty’s social responsibility fund which supports projects inspired by Greater Manchester and that aim to improve local communities.
They have since developed a network of contacts which enable them to bring klezmer, a type of Jewish folk music, into the community, supporting their mission to create intercultural encounters and improve intercultural awareness through music.
We spoke to Richard to find out more about their project and its impact, and what the funding has helped to achieve.
Can you tell us more about your project?
Intercultural musicking in the community is about how people from different cultural backgrounds, musical traditions and audience demographics can come together through musical activities and use these encounters to develop intercultural awareness.
We do this through klezmer, Jewish folk music originally from Eastern Europe. We pioneered a module in klezmer ensemble performance with our undergraduate students, then used the funds from the University to take the activity out into the community. We work with the Manchester Jewish Museum, the Hallé Orchestra and Jewish care homes, as well as Holocaust survivors. The students would not normally have much connectivity with those people, those worlds.
What did you hope to achieve with your project?
We are the only university in the UK which has an assessed klezmer ensemble performance module. When the klezmer students perform, their concert always attracts a large audience and we wanted that to radiate out to the community, but also for the community to enrich the students’ experience. Previously, we've done this in an ad hoc way, so we wanted the funding to allow us to consolidate that bilateral movement where the community ‘talks’ to the University and University ‘talks’ to the community.
How did your project support the University's social responsibility and civic engagement priorities?
It’s this bilateral ‘making a difference’. I think it’s important to give students meaningful encounters beyond the normal remits of student life. For example, in the past, the Holocaust survivors and their families have responded to the students’ performance with delight and a real admiration. It’s making a difference to the student experience, but also to people's experience in the community, and contributing to local relationships and understandings of macro-political themes. I think the intercultural musicking opens a safe space, which, because it has musical respect at its heart, makes conversations possible that probably wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. It enables you to understand individuals rather than essentialised groups of people.
How was your project enhanced and inspired by our location in Greater Manchester?
Greater Manchester is a region that was founded on immigration; diversity is in its fundamental DNA. And our student population is very diverse, but the student experience can be siloed, and the diversity of experience reduced. Greater Manchester as a hinterland of diversity is something which this project feeds off, but also feeds.
What has been the biggest impact that your project has had?
The single biggest impact is that it has provided many predictable and unpredictable intercultural encounters between an array of people from different backgrounds, while being underpinned by this safe space. It's almost like magic. You watch people who wouldn't be together having these interactions if it weren't for the funding that enabled the project to take place. That for me is moving, inspiring and, as an individual and a member of the University, it makes me very proud.
In relation to your project, is there anything planned for the future?
There is, we're always working on new things. We’re putting on an Arts Council-funded play as part of Bradford City of Culture celebrations about a musician called Gideon Klein who was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz in 1945. It’s underpinned by intercultural musicking and is all about the role of music and creativity in adversity.
We've got new things and consolidation of things. It’s about building on that confidence in the intercultural musicking foundation to embrace new opportunities.
How has the funding from the HSCEF aided your project?
It’s enabled us to demonstrate momentum. We have evidence of making a difference through this project and we can demonstrate its value and show that we've got a network of relationships. That has enabled us to receive social responsibility funding and Arts Council England funding. What you can do with this fund is strengthen the relationships, clarify the vision and provide multiple occasions for the activity in question.
What advice would you give to anyone wanting to launch their own project with this fund?
The main thing is to have a project nucleus that you really believe in. What the funding allows you to do is to take that belief and enable it to blossom, to flower, to take root. We knew it would work – we knew these things had potential, but the funding enabled us to demonstrate proof of concept. The project provided underpinning for things which were already happening and made them into this coherent body of work with tangible benefit.
To learn more about this project, visit the Klezmer in the Manchester Community website.
Find out more about the Humanities Strategic Civic Engagement Fund.