Descendants of the medieval Iberian Jewry settled throughout the Mediterranean and beyond since their late-15th century expulsions from the Peninsula (Sepharad). They carried with them mostly non-tangible cultural capitals, such and language and music, which they kept and developed in their new lands of settlement. Continuous processes of preservation and innovation over five centuries generated a plethora of Sephardic liturgical music repertoires that can be still experienced in the present. How is this sacred music conceptualized nowadays by Sephardic Jews themselves, by outsiders and by the mass media in relation to its imagined Iberian pedigree?
This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.
Open to Yale Community only.
Speaker bio:
Edwin Seroussi (Ph.D in Music, UCLA, 1988) is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor Emeritus of Musicology and former director of the Jewish Music Research Centre at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. He comes to Yale after holding a fellowship at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2023-4). His research focuses on musical cultures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, interactions between Jewish and Islamic cultures, Jewish liturgical music, Judeo-Spanish song, and popular music in Israel. Within these subjects he explores the process of hybridization, diaspora, nationalism, and transnationalism. His last book, Sonic Ruins of Modernity: Judeo-Spanish Folksongs Today (Routledge, 2023), stresses the agency of strategically-located individuals and their social networks, the role of recording technologies, and processes of reception and consumption in the shaping of contemporary popular music marketed as “folk.” At the ISM he will be working on a monograph on Sephardic religious music that summarizes his continuing engagement with this subject.