EVERY GENRE PROJECT - February 26 - Sephardic Music

Genre of the Day - Sephardic Music

Album of the Day - Sephardic Romances: Traditional Jewish Music from Spain by Ensemble Accentus

Spain’s behavior really deeply sucked for hundreds of years. As the forerunning dominant colonial empire of the western European powers (yeah, yeah, Portuguese naval empire, other people figured out how to use boats eventually), Spain developed insane systems of racism despite the protests of its own theologians in its quest for riches, and also undertook the Inquisition, which saw the newly Catholic-reclaimed Spain expel hundreds of thousands of Jews who had previously lived peacefully under the Muslim Moors. Yesterday, we looked at the music of a distinctive island culture. The people of today’s genre experienced parallel dynamics, but rather than the physical limitations of island life that allows unique musical traditions to grow and bloom, we look at how marginalization and being insular within a wider community itself affects genre. 

Luckily, though, even brutal expulsion can not prevent music from being treasured and preserved, with the memory of what was lost becoming an even more potent impetus for music’s survival. The history of Jewish people in the Iberian Peninsula goes way back, with mentions as far back as 189 CE, which makes sense given that the Roman Empire facilitated the movement of people all over the Mediterranean. They lived there in peace for a while as most of the peninsula was still pagan, but once Christianity had a foothold, the situation became much less tolerable. Given this, they were understandably obliged to side with the Moors when they came in from Morocco and beat back the Catholics. Under tolerable Muslim rule, art and music flourished. However, crackdowns beginning in the 1100s started centuries-long years of suffering, as the Reconquista yielded initial mixed results into the brutality of the Inquisition.

Given that they lived peacefully among Muslims for hundreds of years in what is called the “Sephardic Golden Age”, it makes sense that a lot of the musical stylings are similar to that of Moorish music and the sound that’s commonly identified with medieval Spanish music today. Even the language is remarkably similar: unlike Yiddish and German, Ladino—the language of the Sephardic Jews—is very close to Spanish, making much of this album often comprehensible even for me as a rudimentary Spanish learner. 

Across an hour of cuts known as romansos or ballads, we get to indulge in a vast palette of emotions and fascinating minor-key melodies, with a female singer providing dramatic and operatic vocals. It ranges from overtly doleful to ferocious and dramatic (“Omorfoula”) to a journey that eventually breaks into gleeful, exuberantly lilting melodies on “Si verias.” Like the history and richness of Sephardic culture, these songs vary significantly, but the melodies do sound particularly distinctive, showing how even with the blending of Spanish and Moorish culture, Sephardic Jews led a musical life all their own that persists hundreds of years past their unfair expulsion from their home, speaking to the power of music as a glue for community.