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The
term Sephardic comes from the reference in the biblical book of
Obadiah to "the land of Sepharad." It is now used to refer to
the Spanish Jews expelled in 1492, and to their descendents today. During
the centuries that followed the Inquisition, the exiled Spanish Jews migrated
and formed communities across Europe, the Near and Middle East, and North
Africa, their language remaining Ladino, the unique form of Judeo-Spanish
that they had spoken in Spain.
The songs of these
Jews, as varied as the places where they made their homes in exile, have
been the passion of the four-person musical ensemble Voice of the Turtle
for the past 21 years. Only one member of the group actually has a Sephardic
background, and in fact they discovered the music by chance, when they
were all members of a Renaissance music ensemble and a fellow member brought
in a Sephardic song to play. This event sent the group's founder, Judith
Wachs, an Ashkenazic Jew whose father sang cantorial repertoire and who
has many cantors in the family, searching through several archives to
learn more about the music.
She began collecting
examples of Sephardic songs and founded Voice of the Turtle with Lisle
Kulbach, and then invited Derek Burrows and Jay Rosenberg to join them.
All four members are classically trained musicians. The group's fascination
with these musical traditions has continued to feed their artistic lives
ever since. "It's a musical and aesthetic passion, for us,"
explains Judith. The group has built a repertoire of Sephardic songs from
medieval times to the present, from Morocco to the Balkans to Jerusalem,
"each of which," says Judith, "we have arranged and recreated
to make it more accessible to contemporary audiences."
Creating a Sephardic
repertoire is not only an artistic challenge for the group, but a committed
undertaking of careful study and preservation. Today, with the globalization
of culture and because of the ravages of the Holocaust, Sephardic musical
traditions are in danger of disappearing. Judith explains, "Generally,
the children and grandchildren of Sephardim are singing rock-n-roll or
jazz, and it takes someone either from out of the community, or the rare
person who appreciates what his parents and grandparents had to preserve
the tradition."
Regarding the research
and knowledge involved in the group's work, she explains, "Just as
someone specializes in Bach or in Chilean music out of love for it, so
must one study and immerse oneself in this musical tradition in order
to feel comfortable with and respectful of it, to feel that one is adding
to it or keeping it alive in some way by inspiring others to keep it alive."
She adds that this is the reason the group has not yet ventured to add
other kinds of Jewish music to their repertoire.
To create their music,
the group works from live recordings made at celebrations in contemporary
Sephardic communities around the world. "When you work with a tradition
that is not your own you have to research everything you can —
the language, and who would sing a particular song and under what circumstances,"
says Judith. These recordings come mostly from an archive compiled by
musicologists at the Jewish Music Research Center at Hebrew University
in Jerusalem during the past thirty years. But the group also takes recording
equipment and video cameras out 'into the field,' that is into Sephardic
communities themselves, or makes recordings of people who come to them
at concerts. The oral tradition preserved in these recordings can reach
back several hundred years, "Most of the time they come from elderly
people aged 60-90 and even older, and they are remembering songs from
their grandparents, so it goes several generations back."
After obtaining the
recordings, often the next step is compiling what is sometimes several
pieces together to get a song, "Often we'll have a recording of someone
who is barely able to carry a tune, and we'll get the words from that
version. And then there's someone from the same community who can sing
a tune but doesn't know the words, and then you kind of verify from one
to the other." Since what the group gets from the recordings is usually
just people singing with no instrumental accompaniment, they must then
arrange the music-by selecting instruments and composing the musical arrangement
using voice and instruments. The variety and creativity of these arrangements
is Voice of the Turtle's signature strength.
Because Sephardic
communities have been influenced by so many different cultures, there
is an incredible variety of both music styles and of instruments. Sometimes
the group relies on the people who sing the songs in the recordings know
which instruments were traditionally used, while at other times they depend
upon research that has been done on the areas where the songs were collected.
Judith explains the complex case of Bulgarian Sephardic songs: "In
Turkey, the musicians who played classical Turkish music at the highest
level were all Jewish. We also know that Turkish orchestras played at
Bulgarian Jewish weddings, and that would be a combination of instruments
that we knowan 'ud, a kamanja, and a saz
or baglama." In addition to more contemporary instruments,
the group plays a variety of exotic medieval and renaissance instruments,
in order to reflect the historical derivation of the songs.
The final, and perhaps
the most crucial, element in the process is combining this mastery of
tradition with musical and artistic skill. "We take the music and
learn it so it becomes part of us and then evolve an orchestration, which
is basically a composition. The challenge for anyone who is working on
oral traditions is to not obliterate it but to incorporate it and be inspired
by it so that the essence of it is still clearly felt," explains
Judith. The group excels at this delicate process: "I think one of
the reasons the four of us have continued to work so well together is
that our musical tastes agree. It's not a formula that we have, it's just
an artistic imperative on which, luckily, we all agree."
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