EFRÉN LÓPEZ

The Official Website

LOS CAMINOS DE SERKECI (SEPHARDIC MUSIC)

Musicians

SPYRIDOULA BAKA voice	SOFIA LAMBROPOULOU kanun	EFRÉN LÓPEZ oud, lavta, cümbüs, kopuz, tambur	MIRIAM ENCINAS recorders, vielle, riq, bendir	ELENI KALLIMOPOULOU kemençe

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Audio

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	Me kemí y m'inflamí (demo, Athens august of 2009)
	De las altas mares (demo, Athens august of 2009)

Thes Sephardic Jews

In 1492 the Catholic King and Queen of Spain, Fernando and Isabel, decreed that all Spanish Jews must either convert or be expelled from what had been their homeland on the Iberian Peninsula since the Christian 1st Century, or in other words for over 1500 years.
The night that the caravels left for the New World was also the last opportunity for Jews to leave the country.

In just a few months over 160,000 Jews emigrated to the Ottoman Empire, Provence, the north of Africa, the Balkan States, Italy and Holland.
Those Spanish Jews who took part in this exodus told stories of medieval Spain on to their children, telling of the customs, music and language. These concepts were then passed form generation to generation and are still preserved today, adapting to whichever place they were told in like a living thing, borrowing words, expressions and phrases from the new languages and using musical instruments native to their new lands.

The traditional songs of Sephardic Jews (descendents of those first emigrants), were and continue to be the romances in the Judeo-Spanish language of Judezmo, erroneously referred to as Ladino which is actually the term for the translations from Hebrew into Spanish that the Rabbis made.

The lyrics of these songs describe the Jewish way of life and tell us of our own history. There are no remaining manuscripts of these popular pieces, but a large part of this inheritance has come to us through an oral tradition which has survived over 500 years.

The Sephardic lifestyle merged with the that of the different lands these people inhabited and melodies, rhythms, instruments, cadences and ornamentation from these cultures were incorporated into the repertoire. Foreign words and other elements that served to express the voice of a people were also taken on.

In this traditional music, the female voice predominates. Men who speak Hebrew participate in the liturgy of the synagogue. It is them who carry the voice in printed lay and folk songs. Women in general did not understand written Hebrew and sang in the Judeo-Spanish language of their daily life. Their songs spoke of the cycle of life; birth, growth, marriage and death.

At the beginning of the 13th Century, the Sephardic colonies on the east and west of the Mediterranean had evolved into two clearly distinguishable cultures. That of the Eastern Mediterranean, influenced by Turkey and the Balkans, and the Western Mediterranean culture, clearly influenced by Moroccan and Spanish ideas. It is still the same today and in constant evolution.

Today’s Jewish community in Spain number around 15,000. Apart from this, there are millions of people who, unaware of their ancestry, are descended from the Jews.

Understanding and sharing these songs is a way of learning about the history of the land we inhabit and enriching our personal and cultural identities.

Our vision of Sephardic Music

We usually listen to Sephardic music that is performed from one of two perspectives: The world of classical musicians, with all that their discipline entails: operatic voices, musicians playing from scores that leave no room for improvisation…or, from what we consider to be an excessively “authentic” standpoint, too centred on recordings that lack arrangements or a more artistic interpretation and attention to detail.

Though we respect both options, we prefer to approach the tradition from the point of view of the lands that gave shelter to the Sephardic Jews. After all that is where they themselves found inspiration as they settled in new lands after the great exodus. We try to embellish the music with the most natural resources that would have been available to these cultures and attempt to preserve the original spirit of each piece as far as possible. Our aim is to present the music for the pleasure of an audience as opposed to treating the songs as untouchable museum pieces, or ethno-musicological material. This latter field is more than adequately covered by the wide range of excellent recordings available on the market.
 

We must also consider that despite their Peninsular origins, the music of the Sephardic Jews came to lose ties with the Iberian traditions. In fact it is frequent to hear songs that were originally in Greek or Turkish adapted to the Judeo-Spanish language, examples of which are “O Ergatis Timimenos” from the Greek or “Gül Pembe” from Turkish. Choruses in these languages are also found in Judeo-Spanish folk songs and of course, new pieces were composed or old romances adapted using the North African or Ottoman modes (makam) and rhythms traditional to the countries of adoption (karsilamas, tsifteteli, curcuna…).

In some cases we have been so daring as to mix Sephardic music with Turkish or Greek that are clearly similar, or to include fragments of our own composition while making every effort to preserve the original spirit of a piece.

Here you can listen to some fragments of old recordings that give examples of all these cases:

● The singer Victoria Hazan from Izmir in Turkey. Recordings in New York in the 40s with songs in the three languages she was fluent in: Judeo-Spanish, Turkish and Greek. Accompanied by the kanun, ud, violin, percussion and clarinet. This is an amazing selection of music in the orchestral style of Turkish cafés, sung in the ancient Iberian language.

Victoria Hazan - Me kemí y me inflamí

● Another musician from Izmir, the blind Josepo Burgana, recorded in 1984 by Susana Weich-Shahak. This professional musician sings romances and accompanies himself on the cümbüs.

Josepo Burgana - Blancaflor y Filomena

● Kantor Isaak Algazi (b.Izmir Turkey 1889, d.Montevideo Uruguay, 1950). A beautiful testimony to Sephardic music in the last decades of the Ottoman period. In the early 20s there was not a single Jewish household boasting a gramophone in Turkey that did not have recordings by Algazi, and by the end of the 30s, he was known throughout Turkey as ne’im zemirot Israel. Algazi was greatly admired not only by the Jewish people, but by the Turks who considered him one of their greatest musicians, and honoured him with the titles of Efendi and Hoca, which are reserved only for the greatest of maestros.

In these examples, taken from 78rpm records published between 1925 and 1929, we can appreciate his command of the Ottoman makam, with two romances. One is accompanied on the ud and the other on the kanun.

● Bienvenida Aguado-Mushabak (1929 Chanakale, Turkey). In this 2002 recording by Susana Weich-Shahak, this truly virtuoso singer gives us a lively sample of how languages and other cultural aspects co-existed in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th Century. The song is sung in Turkish, its original language and in Judeo-Spanish into which it was translated almost word for word.

Bienvenida "Berta" Aguado Mushabak  - Hija mía te quero dar

The sounds of Aman Aman are based on those of the stringed, wind and percussion instruments of the Ottoman Empire and Northern Africa (kanun, ud, cümbüs, baglama, kopuz, nay, kaval, darbuka, riq, bendir etc.) as they can be heard in several old recordings. They are combined here with the somewhat more “up-to-date” sound of the cello, though performed in the style of the modern orchestras of Maghrib, Turkey and Egypt.

This group was formed by seven musicians from four different countries (Valencia, Greece, Morocco and France).

Jewish musicians Chagli Bagdad played at weddings and both Jewish and Muslim celebrations. Here they are in Cairo, 1932 participating in the Arabian Music competition which they went on to win. The musician holding the ud is the famous Daoud Al Kuwaiti.

Sephardic singer from Istanbul, Nissim Baruh plays the kanun in 1914.

(Taken from the book “Es razón de alabar” by Miguel A. Sanchez)

Orchestra from the 30s with ud, kanun, pandero and Jewish singers (Thessaloniki)

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