Re: Is this cassette Jewish?

[Judith R. Cohen <judithc...>]

Hi, Sheryl, Joel, About Aurora Morena's cassette,
Yes, it was done before Saga and Several split up, in the first big wave
of Sephardophilism (?!) in Spain. Aurora (originally from Granada)
hadn't in fact sung this music before: she sings all kinds of stuff,
20th century, whatever, and she took on the project. I think Joaquin
Diaz gave her most of the Judeo-Spanish songs. She told me she
deliberately used the synthesizer drone in the romance (narrative
ballad) "El Polo" out of a sense of anti-authentication mischievousness
(that's not quite what she said in Spanish, some years ago, but close!)
I really like her voice, actually.
Anyway, the other side of the cassette. This is worth an entire
course.First, they're not muwashshahat , they're kharja's (English j: so
KHARD-dzha). That helps, right? Read on.
 The question of Jewish elements in the moaxajas (muwashshahat - the x
is an older, not very useful spelling, same problem as the Paxaros
(=Pasharos) Sefardis used to have with people pronouncing it
"Paksaros"):
Most muwashshahat were in colloquial Arabic - a new idea at the time,
deliberately composing poetry in colloquial rather than classical Arabic
- , but there was also a large body of Hebrew ones, in the same basic
style. But what Aurora has set to music here are not in fact muwashahas
(I'll leave out the second sh for simplicity's sake) but kharja's.
These are little "coda"'s added on to the end of a muwashaha, in Arabic
or Hebrew, depending on the main poem, and are a sort of pithy tail-end
comment on the more serious, longer, structured poem. They are often in
the voice of a woman - which, like the Cantigas d'amigo of 12th-13th
century Galicia/Portugal, does NOT mean they were necessarily originally
women's songs; they're just as likely to have been men's visions of how
they liked their women (always ready for more, basically). 
But the real interest of the khardja's from the Hispanist and linguist
point of view is that many of them actually appear to be in very early
Spanish, when one deciphers the Arabic or Hebrew characters, so that
they may indeed have been, say, adaptations of popular songs or sayings
(or then again, maybe not). But the degree of Spanish in them has been
quite hotly debated by scholars over the years since they were first
discovered in the 1940's. Many words can be kind of tortured into
Spanish and are as likely to be Arabic, but others are clearly early
Spanish. 
I could go on.... But anyway, they have NO KNOWN MELODIES. And they were
not, to anyone's knowledge, sung on their own as Aurora does (and a
couple of early music ensembles have done here and there), but rather
where they were meant to be, at the end of a nice long muwashah, as the
"dessert". Any music they are sung to is either adapted from Arabic
tunes people have used to set the poems - obviously, much later than the
poems - or composed, as in this case. By and large, the kharja's from
the Hebrew muwashahat aren't that different form the Arabic ones; I'd
have to go back and dig out files and things for more details.
Does this help? Judith

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