Music of the Sephardic Jews on Future Radio

I find myself returning again and again to Diáspora Sefardí, Jordi Savaal’s anthology of Eastern Sephardic music and this Sunday, March 9, I will be sharing this wonderful music with Future Radio listeners. Migration, survival and assimilation are all too familiar themes today, and it is worth retelling the story of the Sephardic Jews to remind us that culture is still more resilient than politics.


During Roman times large numbers of Jews migrated into the Iberian peninsula of their own free, and their numbers were increased by Jewish slaves who were shipped into the region during the Diaspora following the defeat of Judea in the first century BC. In the fifth century Iberia came under Visigoth rule, and the conversion of the Visigoth royal family from Arianism to Catholicism brought the first persecution of Jews.


The Muslim invasion of southern Iberia in the eighth century was welcomed by the Jews, and the two centuries of Muslim rule are seen as the golden age of Sephardic Jewry. During this period Arabic culture had a major impact on the Sephardic community with Arabic being used as the principal language for Sephardic science, philosophy and everyday business. This golden age was nurtured by Abd al-Rahman III (882-942) who was the first independent Caliph of Cordoba, and the city became an important centre for Sephardic Jews.


In 1492 the Christian Reconquista of the Muslim and Moorish states of Al-Ándalus was completed when Granada fell to Ferdinand and Isabella, Los Reyes Católicos (The Catholic Monarchs). The same year the Jews were expelled from Spain by royal edict, and in 1497 they were also driven out of Portugal. Following their expulsion the Jews settled in north Africa, France and Italy. Initially Sephardic culture assimilated influences from the Arab culture of north Africa, from the Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Rumainians and Serbocroats and Bosnians. In more modern times Sephardic immigrants settled in other parts of Europe including the Low Countries, North and South America, and of course Israel.


The term Sephardic comes from standard Hebrew, and in modern Hebrew the term still means ‘Spain’. In Israel today the word Sephardic is used for any Jew who not in the main Ashkenazi grouping which originated from Germany, Poland, Austria and Eastern Europe. This means Sephardic includes Jews from Arabic and Persian backgrounds who may not be migrants from Iberia, but who use the Sephardic style of liturgy. As my illustrations show the Sephardic legacy is considerable, and notable Sephardic Jews (defined as having at least one Sephardic parent) include Maurice Abravanel, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Benjamin Disraeli, Hélène Grimaud, Otto Klemperer, Rosa Luxemburg, Darius Milhaud, Amedeo Modigliani, Murray Perahia, Charles and Maurice Saatchi, Baruch Spinoza, Diego Velázquez, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz - aka the second Mrs Nicolas Sarkozy.


Diáspora Sefardí is a double CD of songs, ballads and instrumental music from the eastern Sephardic communities. The music is a real revelation, reflecting diverse influences including its medieval Hispanic origins, the Ottoman style, and the folk music of the Balkans. Jordi Savaal and Hespèrion XXI play on authentic ethnic instruments, and the charismatic Montserrat Figueras sings. The recording was made in 1999 in the Castillo de Cardona, Cataluna, and the sound captured by producer Nicolas Bartholomée is quite outstanding. I will be playing music from Diáspora Sefardí on my Future Radio programme at 5.00pm on Sunday March 9 repeated at 12.50am on March 10. The coupling is a new recording of Lou Harrison's Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra.


Illustrations from the excellent University of California, Irvine Sephardic culture website. Now read about another lost people.
Listen on Future Radio at 5.00pm every Sunday and 12.50am every Monday UK time in real time here (convert to local time zones here). Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Free music - so what's new?

'Music industry finds the solution to its pirate troubles - give everything away' - screams a Guardian headline. Sorry folks, but the classical sector has been giving away music for years. Here from my current Visa bill are the prices I paid for CDs online recently including delivery: Messiaen Des canyons aux étoiles (2CDs) - £4.00, Dallapiccola choral works - £3.41, Stockhausen piano works - £4.22, Elgar Dream of Gerontius (2CDs) - £5.67.

It actually gets worse in the stores. Just last week I bought 10CDs of Thomas Tallis' complete works in recordings made as recently as 2004 for £3 a CD, and that wasn't discounted. In HMV stores you can currently pick up 14CDs of the complete Mahler symphonies by classical music's premium brands, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, for £1.79 a disc. That means a Mahler CD from our industry's most prestigous band now costs less than a cappuccino, and it's not expanding the market for classical music or filling concert halls at all.

So with prices already at rock-bottom what will be the impact of free downloads from Qtrax and others? Classical music will become just another disposable commodity. Download it, give it a quick listen, it doesn't appeal on first hearing? No problem, delete it and try again. Contemporary composers had better start thinking catchy, and record companies (if any survive) had better start thinking instant gratification.

Benjamin Britten had it nailed when he wrote 'Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy composer, performer and listener'

So what does a dead composer (European to boot) know about today's market with its MP3s and iTunes? The answer is a lot. Britten wasn't just a composer, he was a musical polymath whose vision created one of the few successful, and growing, classical music communities in the world. Last year Aldeburgh Music sold 91,000 tickets. I wonder how many bargain basement Berlin Philharmonic Mahler boxes EMI has sold in the UK - 5000 perhaps? The solution for the music industry isn't to give everything away. It's the opposite. Think added value, think Glossa, think Soli deo Gloria, but above all think Alia Vox.

Now playing is Jordi Savall's newly released Francisco Javier 1506-1553, the Route to the Orient on Alia Vox. Yes, it comes with 2CDs of lovingly researched and performed music, but there is much more in the form of a 273 page colour book (cover above) which is a work of art in itself. In it there are fascinating and scholarly articles ranging from early music performance, to Erasmus of Rotterdam, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Martin Luther, as well as Francisco Xavier, who was an early Jesuit missionary, himself. And the whole package is worth far more than the sum of the parts. I paid £30 for it in Prelude Records in Norwich, and that is the best £30 I have spent on recorded music for a long time. I didn't get two CDs for my money, I got a unique musical experience. And that is what will rejuvenate the market, not giveaways.

Britten would have approved. The Route to the Orient is about as far from instant gratification as you can go. It demands preparation by reading the book, and it also demands effort to understand the non-Western music that it explores. You must leave your computer and take a journey to a special place called an independent record store to buy it, and you will also need to save up as it is not available online at a discount or as a download. The thoughtfully planned multi-cultural programme needs to be understood, and clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts are definitely needed for close encounters with instruments such as the shinobue, nokan, sarod and shakuhachi.

Are added value projects like Francisco Javier, the Route to the Orient and Christopher Columbus, Lost Paradises (below) the future of classical music? Or are they just small ripples in a big pond? Only time will tell. But I haven't heard Alia Vox talking about mass redundancies, and their 2008 release schedule looks pretty healthy. Which is more than can be said for EMI.


It was Philip Glass who said world music is the new classical.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk