BRIO, founded by Steve Rosenberg in 2002, is devoted to the performance of medieval, Renaissance, and Sephardic music. The group performs with period instruments and features the singing of the young Brazilian countertenor, José Lemos. Brio’s colorful array of instruments includes rebec and viols played by Mary Anne Ballard, and recorders, krummhorn, gemshorn, and Renaissance and Baroque guitars played by Steve Rosenberg. Danny Mallon, percussionist extraordinaire, rounds out the quartet with a smorgasbord of Mediterranean hand drums, tambourines, wood block, castanets, and other exotic ideophones. Brio is joined for this program by Larry Lipkis who plays gemshorn, recorder and viols.

Music of the Sephardic Jews

In Jewish culture, music has always played an integral role in day-to-day life, providing historians and musicologists with a musical thumbprint of local histories. The Sephardic musical tradition is no exception, as the Iberian Jews inhabited Spain well before Roman times, soaking up the practices of the surrounding cultures. Unfortunately, Sephardic music’s history proves to be particularly difficult to pinpoint, as this music was passed on completely by rote in a longstanding oral tradition. To make matters even more complicated, Spain and Portugal expelled the Jews in 1492 and 1497 respectively, dispersing the Sephardim across the globe. At the same time, these circumstances make Sephardic music perhaps one of the most exciting repertoires for performers and scholars alike.

Experts disagree on the origins of Sephardic music, and three schools of thought exist concerning this problem. Purists argue that Sephardic Jews carried the musical traditions of their homeland wherever they traveled, thereby preserving their culture, much like a piece of amber fossilizing the contents of its former environment. The best evidence for this lies in the preservation of the poetic and musical traditions of the romance. These ballads consist of couplets of two eight-syllable lines in assonant rhyme, a style imported from Galician-Portuguese cancioneros, which were strongly influenced by the poetic meter of the troubadours. Whether popular or courtly songs had first utilized this meter is unclear, but Sephardic music probably borrowed freely from both repertoires. On this CD, the songs Porque llorax and Una tarde de verano exemplify the old tradition of the romance in rhyme scheme and poetic meter.

The second, and most probable theory of origin is that Sephardic music and culture acts as a living, breathing entity, adopting aspects of each new environment encountered. Old melodies would absorb new modes and ornamentation styles as the Jews assimilated with their new surroundings. A lot of Sephardic music utilizes the maqam, a distinctly Turkish microtonal scale system. The melody of a song would have been altered in order to fit into a specific mode. Ornamentation would also have been added, varying these simpler folk melodies with the performance practices of the area. Similarly, the native tongue of the Iberian Jews, Ladino, began as an amalgam of Castilian and Hebrew. When the Jews had migrated to other areas of the globe, the language absorbed loanwords and phonetics of the region, while maintaining most of the grammar, phonology, and vocabulary from before. Linguists share a special interest in Ladino, as it has more successfully preserved aspects of medieval Castilian than its modern equivalent has managed. One could entertain the idea that the music would have followed a similar conservative transformation.

A third point of view argues that the music recorded today bears no resemblance to the music of the Sephardic Jews before they left Iberia. One problem is that even within medieval Spain, before the edict of 1492, different regions had differing musical traditions. Since the Jews had been located in many areas across Spain, the sheer variability of the musical sensibilities from place to place would prevent the pinpointing of any single point of origin for Sephardic music and poetry. Furthermore, the migration of this diverse group into equally diverse foreign lands would obscure the distinction of old versus new and unified versus diverse in regard to forming a notion of an original Sephardic music. To add to the confusion, Spain endured invasion after invasion of varying cultures from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East for quite some time prior to the expulsion. All in all, it is rather difficult to discern who was influencing whom and when.

Following their expulsion from Spain, Iberian Jews were planted across the globe in what is referred to as the diaspora, or the scattering of seeds. A large portion of the population migrated to the Ottoman Empire, as the Muslims had always been much more tolerant of the Jews. In fact, Sultan Bayezid II later wrote to Iberian King Ferdinand expressing his gratitude for some of his best subjects, newly arrived thanks to the Spanish inquisition. Though written in a rather tongue-in-cheek-manner, the letter is evidence that life in the Ottoman empire provided the Jews with a higher status than that which they held in Christian Europe. Other areas to which they eventually migrated include Italy, France, England, Germany and the Low Countries. In the seventeenth century, some moved to English and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, India, South America and, later, the United States and Canada. With each relocation, their music absorbed aspects of the music of their new home. Perhaps the most fascinating consequence of migration was that the presence of these Jewish melodies—however transformed—across the globe now delineated a musical map of the singers’ travels and immersion in new musical cultures.

It was not until the late nineteenth century that musicologists began collecting Sephardic songs, committing them to paper for the first time. Traditionally, when women sang these works, it was without accompaniment while performing household tasks. Men would often add the oud, a Middle Eastern version of the lute, or the qanún, a Turkish zither. At weddings, tambourines as well as other percussion instruments would have been used. Just as the Turkish musical modes had made their way into the Sephardic tradition, so did a number of instruments imported from various cultures. As a performer, the task today of choosing the accompanying instruments for each song is an art form in itself, and perhaps one of the most exciting parts of the musical process.

This collection of songs recorded by Brio incorporates instruments from the medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods as well as the western and eastern traditions. One instrument in particular, the rebec, straddles both time periods and continents. The rebec is a predecessor of the modern violin and derives from the Middle Eastern rebab. Eventually the rebab was modified and transformed into the rebec after being imported into Europe: instead of being constructed from dried gourds and having two or four strings, it was now built from wood and strung with three or six strings; the technique in which the instrument was played was also sometimes altered from being played vertically in one’s lap, to horizontally on the arm (similar to how a baroque violin would be played).

The other string and wind instruments included on this recording are western in origin, including the Renaissance and Baroque guitars (which came from the Iberian peninsula), as well as the various viols and recorders. With the exception of the castanets however, the percussion instruments hail from North Africa or the Middle East. The darbuka originated in Turkey and sports an hourglass shape; similar drums can be found throughout Africa and Asia. The tar and riq are categorized as frame drums, both originating from the medieval daff. The main difference lies in the fact that the riq developed into an Arabic tambourine.

With such a wide variety of instruments and instrumental combinations, one can hear Turkish and Middle Eastern influences in some songs, while other compositions take on a more Iberian inflection. The breadth of these musical choices allows performers to make these works their own. Much as the Sephardim found a home wherever they traveled, their music today has the capacity for finding a home with a wide variety of performers and listeners who are entranced by their engaging songs.

–Zachary Wilder

August 20, 2007

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