Simple Gifts is an outstanding duo who perform a number of instruments and styles of music. In a workshop geared toward amateur and professional musicians, Simple Gifts will teach participants to play Klezmer music. Klezmer, the traditional music of the Eastern European Jewish population, uses scales, modes, ornaments and expressions that are different from Western music.

Participants from the workshop will perform what they learned, and then Simple Gifts will present a program that will focus on Klezmer and related styles from Eastern Europe, especially Romanian, Russian, and Balkan music. Throughout the program, Simple Gifts will include educational narrative that will help the audience to better understand this music.

After the concert, audience members who want to learn more can stay to ask questions and see some of the instruments up close. Some of Simple Gifts' less fragile instruments can be handled and played by audience members. The Simple Gifts musicians will give informal group lessons to people who gather around these instruments.

These workshops and performance were supported in part by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.