Sephardic Folk Songs / Gloria Levy

folkways.si.edu

Folkways Records, Edición española FE 54.9324
1994

LP original: Folkways Records FW 8737
1959

01 - Quando veyo hija hermoza   [1:08]
02 - Durme hermoza donzeya   [2:37]
03 - Yo se un mansevo del dor   [1:18]
04 - Dame la mano   [2:43]
05 - La vida do por el raki   [2:14]
06 - En este mundo   [2:02]
07 - Fel sharah canet betet masha   [1:52]
08 - A tan alta va la luna   [1:36]
09 - Morenica   [2:12]
10 - A la una   [1:57]
11 - Barmeenan   [1:22]
12 - Minush   [1:37]
13 - Ven hermoza   [0:46]
14 - Diz y ocho años tengo   [0:58]
15 - Tres de la noche   [1:27]
16 - La Pastora   [2:50]
17 - Arvolicos d'almendra   [1:25]
18 - Esta montaña   [1:25]
19 - Fidanico de yasimin   [1:46]
20 - Arvoles yoran por luvias   [1:46]
21 - Galanica   [1:29]

Gloria Levy, voice
her mother, mandoline & tambourine
her husband, drum


RECORDED BY MEL KAISER AT CUE
MASTERED BY DAVID HANCOCK
RODUCTION DIRECTOR - MOSES ASCH
FOLKWAYS RECORDS Album No. FW 8737
© 1959/1979 by Folkways Records & Service Corp. , 43 W. 61st St. , NYC, USA 10023








THE SEPHARDIC SONG
by
Professor H. J. Benardete

1492 is the key-year to Spanish and Latin American history. Needless to say, it is also the focal point in time for the United States and seen from our own times it is the date that has changed World History. A date that has so many implications could not help being also important in the little-known by-paths of culture. Spain is the mother of the folkways of the Spanish-speaking people. From immemorial epochs the lberic Peninsula has been the cradle of fascinating peoples and cultures. It is the land where the folk in all its significance has created for itself the constituent elements that are associated always with the folk: music, songs, dances, the popular crafts, ceremonies both secular and religious. Perhaps Spain is the only European country that has had always a folk though the words folk, folkways, folklore, are difficult to define with precision. Yet we can say a few things about these words that would be approximately meaningful. Jose Ortega y Gasset, the brilliant Spanish philosopher and essayist, has stated somewhere that the folk does only preserve but does not create. On the other hand, Don Ramón Hernández Pidal, the indisputable great Spanish scholar, who knows more than anyone else about the folk literature of his country, has corrected Ortega's cavalierly-facile definition by pointing out that the folk through its selectivity, taste and its innate tendency to suppress the superfluous, contributes enormously in the process of time, to shape the folkways to meet aesthetic standards that instinctively are felt to satisfy the demands of passionate temper, rhythm and eternal human values. A folksong and a folk dance might have arisen in cultivated circles, but in their transmissions they suffer transmutations that make of the song and the dance new products. Culture and instinct, learning and rhythm, elaboration and simplicity - these are traits of all art, nonetheless in the surviving and always satisfying folk products, the anonymous collaborations do follow patterns of excellence. It is no wonder then that when we enter historical periods of sophisticated art, composers, poets, seers, from all over the west go to Spain for inspiration and rejuvenations.

The above general remarks are equally applicable to the folkways of the Spanish-speaking Jews. The first phonograph record of the traditional songs of the Sephardic Jews, now in the repertory of the Folkways Records is another contribution that enriches our knowledge and enjoyment of the Spanish Song. We must give here a very brief account of the Sephardim or Sefardíes as they are known in Spanish. 1492 is again a fatal date: for it was in that miraculous year that Spain became, ideologically speaking, a Totalitarian State. For more than seven centuries (711 - 1492) Spain was the only European country that exercised religious tolerance. Under Islamic and Christian sovereignties, Jews, Moslems, and Catholics lived side by side developing for themselves highly original cultures. The Jews of Spain called the lberic Peninsula Sepharad, and because they were capable to evolve a culture in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and in the Romance Languages of their land, so rich and all-embracing, that they have deserved to be considered a people apart. The Spanish Middle Ages gave Europe and the world new ideas and new forms of art.

Early in the ninth century, a blind Moslem poet of Cabra, in Southern Spain, invented a poetical pattern called in Arabic, Muwwashaha or Girdle Song. The Muwwashaha begins usually with a rhyming couplet; the rest of the poem is made of quatrains. The first three lines of each stanza have the same rhyme - for example, using English words, we would have man - pan -tan - and the fourth line of each quatrain would have different words that would rhyme with the refrain-couplet. Here is an illustration: if the couplet has pin and sin in rhyme, then the fourth line would naturally demand words ending in "in", such as thin - fin - bin, etc. With a little imagination the reader could project on a piece of paper this song-form and he readily would see how the refrain-rhyme is caught every fourth line. The binding rhyme is then the Girdle Song.

Learned poets wrote in the middle age muwwashaha in Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, German, etc. It just happened that the greatest of the Sephardic Hebrew poets, Judah Halevy. Ibn Gabirol, Moses ben Ezra wrote enduring muwwashaha. Unlike the other Peninsular traditions, the Sephardic Jews have preserved for a thousand years these Girdle Songs for their religious and secular ceremonies. In all the synagogues a haunting mystical song in honor of the Sabbath, the Leha Dodi is sung with ecstasy. Few people suspect that its poetical form is no other than the poem-song form of the Andalusian poet from Cabra in the province of Cordoba. We see then that a poem-song is transmitted into a semi-popular or folksong and is treasured by the folk for centuries on end.

In their exile the Spanish-speaking Jews who established themselves in North Africa and in the countries and lands that were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire stubbornly adhered to their Iberic cultural patrimony. The Sephardim from North Africa because they were not very far from Spain have to this day the richest collection of ballads, dance-songs, death songs, lyrics for all-festival occasions. Melodically this rich repertory has innumerable affinities with the lberic tradition. But the Spanish-Jews of the Mediterranean basin who still express themselves in Medieval Spanish have been influenced considerably by the Levantine dialects, languages and folkways.

Gloria Levy's repertory comes almost exclusively from the Levantine countries. Philologists use the Greek word Koine for the almost uniform lingua franca that developed in those countries ever since 1492. Among these Iberian Jews, idioms, words, phrases, taken from Turkish, Greek, the Slavonic languages, Hebrew, Italian, French, have entered into the Judeo-Spanish spoken by the Hispano-Levantines. The lyrics of this record, linguistically speaking have some words that come from the languages mentioned above.

Let us take at random a few versus from these songs:

A (#3)
Yo se un mancebo del dor

B (#13)
Ven hermoza, Ven conmi
que mi padre es pasmangi

C (#5)
La vida doy por el raki

D (#11)
Una hija tengo, Barminam
Me la llaman tengere, Barminam
Cuando sali a la plaza, Barminam
Me la hacen Kepaze

Now dor is Hebrew and it means generations and here its meaning is up-to-date, fashionable. Basmangi, is Turkish for drygoods-merchant. Raki is Turkish also for the white-coloured brandy known under the Spanish name of anís. The refrain of the fast-moving song, barminam is talmudic Hebrew, meaning a ghost but in the Judeo-Spanish song in question it is equivalent to God forbid!, and finally tengere and Kepaze are Turkish words signifying a cooking-pot and shame.

But what is a most astonishing factor in these songs is the purity of the Spanish remaining in their grammar and vocabulary. Any Spaniard or Latin American would accept as traditional folksongs the following samples:

A (#1)
Duerme, duerme, hermosa doncella,
Duerme, duerme sin ansia y dolor!
Es tu eschevo que tanto desea.
Ver tu sueno con granite amor.

B (#4)
En la mar hay una torre.
En la torre hay una ventana
En la ventana hay una paloma
Que a los marineros llama!

C (#5)
¡Dios de los cielos,
Patron del mundo
Y de las alturas!
Hazme conocer muy presto
La mi ventura.

D (#8)
Decidle a la morena
Si quiere venir
La nave ya está en vela
Que ya va a partir.

E (#6)
En abashando (En bajando)
De la escalera
Vide una sangre correr
Es la sangre de mi morena
Que's mas dulce que la miel.

Take the last three lines of the last song (#6), what more Spanish song could one find anywhere! The flowing of blood, the blood of the dark-haired girl, and the sweet as honey lips of charm -- in these verses we have the Spain of Carmen, of the bull ring and that of Garcia Lorca, the martyred poet's tragedies... In all these twenty-four verses there is not a single foreign word! They are part of the basic vocabulary of the Spanish language. Certain grammatical forms are dialectal and medieval in origin. Modern Spanish has lost the sounds sh as in shoe, the voiced s as in zero, the g sound in the word general and the f sound of the French word four or in the English word azure. We find these sounds in Judeo-Spanish: sh in abashar - bajar, to come down; intervocalic s is pronounced as in French and Italian like z, so rosa becomes phonetically roza; gente, people in modern Spanish has the asperate sound of h for the initial g but in our songs it is djente and finally mujer, woman, in Judeo-Spanish is sounded muher.

The songs of our collection in Folkways Records in no way hint at the functional role played by them in the folk traditions of the Sephardic Jews. Folksongs usually enter into the dramatic situations of life: birth, adolescence, manhood and death. Peoples who are truly folk do not incorporate capriciously the new and ephemeral. In the cities the masses have lost the meaning of the fundamental functions of life. The folk, on the other hand, remain faithful to the ways of the race and their forefathers. Among the Sefardíes, birth-songs, courtship-songs, wedding-songs, festival songs, and death songs, have always highlighted the basic rhythms of life. When most of them would be sung and preserved in records, they will show all lovers of the folkways what a rich quarry is at hand and for exploitation!

Since there is a linguistic koine, as it was said above, we must also think of a musical koine too. Contrary to expectations the melodies of folksongs are shed off more often than people think. Fashions in melody invade the folksongs and imperceptibly the old tunes disappear. But what is constant is the language patterns. Distance from Spain made the Levantine songs lose contact with the Peninsular music tradition. The Levant became in the XIXth Century exposed to the song fashions of France, Italy, Greece and even England. The student of folksongs will not find it difficult to establish similarities between the European popular song and the Levantine songs. As it could be expected the Turkish melodic line is very pronounced in some of these airy Hispano Levantine folksongs. The Spanish-Jews, musically speaking, are more orientalized than in their language and character. If the lberic elan has been weakened, yet the variety of song traditions assimilated by these folksongs has added a wonderful new dimension to the Spanish songs of the Sephardic folkways ...

QUANDO VEYO HIJA HERMOZA - WHEN I SEE A  PRETTY GIRL
Dance

DURME HERMOZA DONZEYA - SLEEP LOVELY MAIDEN
Probably very old.

YO SE UN MANSEVO DEL DOR - I AM A VERY MODERN YOUNG MAN

DAME LA MANO - GIVE ME YOUR HAND
A sailor's song; probably very old. There are more verses to it.

LA VIDA DO POR EL RAKI - I'D GIVE MY LIFE FOR RAKI
Raki is a powerful liquor made in the Near East.

EN ESTE MUNDO - IN THIS WORLD

FEL SHARAH CANET BETET MASHA - WALKING DOWN THE STREET
To the tune of the Turkish “Uskadara." This version has five languages in it, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and English. It was sung only in Egypt. There is another version in Ladino, that was sung in Salonika.

A TAN ALTA VA LA LUNA - THE MOON CLIMBS HIGH

MORENICA - DARK BEAUTY
To be "Morenica" - dark eyes, dark hair was the ideal of beauty. Sung at weddings - guests sang it dancing around the bride (these weddings lasted a week). There are more verses.

A LA UNA - AT ONE O'CLOCK
Probably one of the oldest songs

BARMEENAN! - HEAVEN FORBID
Sung only in Salonika
Full of Greek & Turkish words.

MINUSH - MINUSH  ( A Girl's Name in Turkish )
Probably very old.
Note the use of 7 & 3, mystical numbers

VEN HERMOZA - COME, PRETTY GIRL

DIZ Y OCHO ANOS TENGO - I AM 18 YEARS OLD
Probably very old.

TRES DE LA NOCHE - THREE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
Also sung to another tune

LA PASTORA - THE SHEPHERDESS
Probably very old.

ARVOLICOS D'ALMENDRA - ALMOND TREES
The greatest compliment on a woman's eyes - like almonds

ESTA MONTANA - THIS MOUNTAIN
Also sung to two other tunes - Tres de la noche and Fidanico

FIDANICO DE YASIMIN - LITTLE JASMINE BLOSSOM
Also sung to tune of Tres de la noche

ARVOLES YORAN POR LUVIAS - TREES CRY  FOR RAIN
Sung by some people without the chorus. Probably very old.

GALANICA - PRETTY ONE
Probably very old




GLORIA LEVY

Gloria Levy grew up in New York City in a trilingual household -- Ladino, French and English were spoken simultaneously and interchangeably. In time-honored tradition, she learned these songs from her mother who was born in Alexandria, Egypt. Her father comes from Izmir (Smyrna), Turkey, where the family lived for many generations after being expelled from Spain during the Spanish Inquisition.

"In spite of the revival of interest in Jewish studies, Sephardic culture remains almost unknown. Ladino is no longer being spoken except by elderly Sephardim. I like to think that this record will help preserve some of the beauties of the language and the music."

Under the name Gloria Kirchheimer, she writes fiction which has appeared in various literary magazines. She is married to Manny Kirchheimer, the filmmaker. They have two sons.

This record being a family affair, her mother plays the mandolin and tambourine accompaniment and her husband -- although an Ashkenazi -- plays the drum.



Professor H. J. BENARDETE

Born in the town of Dardanelles in Asia Minor; came to the United States in 1910; studied in the schools of Cincinnati, Ohio; graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1922. Received his M. A. and PH. D. degrees from Columbia University. Did graduate work in Madrid. Has been a college teacher in the Colleges of the City of New York for the past thirty-five years. Now a professor of the Spanish Language and its Culture. Today considered the "Dean of Spanish Teachers" in this country. His speciality in scholarly work is in the field of Sephardic Studies. His book Hispanic Culture and Character of the Sephardic Jews (Hispanic Institute. Columbia University) is the standard work in this field. Everywhere he is ranked as the foremost authority in Sephardic scholarship. He has lectured on all the phases of the Iberic Jews, their history, their culture, their literature, their mysticism, etc.