Re: Is this cassette Jewish?

[Lori Cahan-Simon <L_Cahan...>]

I am constantly astounded by the level of scholarship of the people on this
list.  Thank you, everyone, for your constant erudition and willingness to
teach, a very Jewish quality.
Lorele

Judith R. Cohen wrote:

> 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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