Sephardic Music in the Mediterranean Soundscape

Lecture

Sephardic Music in the Mediterranean Soundscape

Date: Sun, Feb 25, 2018 02:00PM - Sun, Feb 25, 2018 03:00PM
Price: $20, $18 Friends, $12 students and seniors

Trace the development of Sephardic songs and singers from medieval Spain and Portugal to North Africa and across the Mediterranean to the Balkans, Salonika, the fabled Constantinople, and back to Iberian lands. Ethnomusicologist and singer Dr. Judith Cohen draws on her many years of research and fieldwork to tell the story of Sephardic people and their songs through images, stories, and historic recordings — as well her through her own singing.


Dr. Judith Cohen is an ethnomusicologist, medievalist, and singer. Originally from Montreal, she has lived in Toronto for many years and teaches in the music department of York University. She is internationally known for her research, publications, and performances of traditional Sephardic songs, and songs of the Sephardic diaspora in the Balkans, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and French Canada. Dr. Cohen has also conducted fieldwork for two decades among the Crypto-Jews of rural Portugal, and is the editor and consultant for the 1952 Spain field recordings of the legendary Alan Lomax, whose Spanish journals she is currently editing. Her work with Sephardic and related music reflects her earlier research on women and music in the three religious communities of medieval Iberia. Alongside her scholarly work, she continues to perform and give workshops on the music traditions she studies.

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