What’s in a song?

Musicians from all over the world gather in the capital next week to perform Sephardi music from the 15th and 16th centuries.

By BARRY DAVIS
'Me la Amargates Tu' (photo credit: GABRIELLE VAN DER WERF)
'Me la Amargates Tu'
(photo credit: GABRIELLE VAN DER WERF)
Me la Amargates Tu, which will perform at the Jerusalem YMCA on June 7 as part of the Israel Festival, comprises six singers and instrumentalists, hailing from Argentina, Greece, Venezuela, England, Mexico and Israel. Making things even more cosmopolitan is that British-born harp player Sarah Ridy now resides in Belgium, Venezuelan viola da gamba player Tulio Rondon has relocated to the United States, and Greek-born recorder player Doret Florentin now lives in Israel.
The name of the ensemble, which will be performing Sephardi music from the 15th and 16th centuries, comes from a quote taken from a wellknown Ladino song, but also has a powerful Holocaust connection, notes Florentin, a native of Salonika.
“Me la Amargates Tu means ‘you have made my life bitter,’” she explains. “It is a line from ‘Adio Querrida,’ which is a very popular Ladino song, which was sung by the Jews of Salonika on the trains to Auschwitz. The melody also appears in [Verdi opera] La Traviata.”
The latter, apparently, is something of a contentious issue.
“Some people say Verdi took the tune from the Ladino song, and others say the Jews took the melody from the opera and added words,” she continues.
“It is difficult to know.”
Exacerbating the chronology conundrum is the lack of documentation.
“It is difficult to know, unless you identify something, say, Eastern in the melody, or some clearly recognizable interval in the music which pertains to a particular style from a specific period,” she says. “You can hear that ‘Adio Querrida’ is from a later period than the Middle Ages.”
Ladino music is a vast musical and stylistic expanse, which is largely a result of the dispersion of Ladinospeaking Jews across the world, from the Balkans to North Africa, from Turkey to The Netherlands and Britain – as well as, naturally, this part of the world. There are many Ladino dialects, including a Jerusalem dialect, and the music of Ladino songs reflects those idiomatic differences.
Today there is plentiful research material on Ladino music and speech, from the work of such scholars as Shoshana Weiss-Shahak, who recorded Ladino speakers and musicians back in the 1950s, to Israeli Ladino singer Hadass Pal-Yarden, who wrote a doctoral thesis on the language’s Jerusalem dialect.
“Shoshana Weiss-Shahak collected audio and video recordings of people singing Ladino songs, and it is amazing to hear the different versions,” notes Florentin. “Sometimes you can’t believe that the two renditions are versions of the same song.”
The Me la Amargates Tu concert will accommodate some of the musical discrepancies.
“We will perform different tunes of the same song,” says the recorder player. “For example, there is a very wellknown Ladino song, which is called ‘Hitragut’ [Relaxing] in Israel, which has a completely different title in Spanish. The Hebrew words are not a translation of the original Spanish lyrics, and the tune is different. We will perform the Hebrew one, with its own words and melody, and then the Ladino one with its own words.
I think it will be interesting for the audience to hear the different versions.”
The sonic stretch will be flexed even further by the members of the ensemble.
“We wrote arrangements of the songs, and we leave a lot of room for improvisation,” explains Florentin.
“There are a lot places that are open.
The only thing we decide in advance is who plays at which juncture of the song. Everything else is created on the spot.”
That demands a generous comfort zone among the members of the ensemble, and a lot of trust.
Fortunately, says the recorder player, “we have known each other since 2007, so we feel comfortable with each other and trust each other.”
All six attended the Royal Conservatory at The Hague, where they met and eventually joined creative forces. However, one early encounter between Florentin and Mexican percussionist Juan Martinez started out with a difference of opinion.
“We met at a party, and I sang ‘Adio Querrida’ to him, because that was the only Spanish I knew, and he said that wasn’t the right way to sing the song, and that they sang it differently in Mexico,” she recalls. She was confident she was right, and set out to bring indisputable evidence with her the next time she met Martinez.
“I used to sing the song with my grandparents when I was a kid. I checked it out with my teachers, and people in Greece and all over, and I came back to him with proof that my version was the right one,” she says.
“We had a good laugh about it, and that’s how the ensemble began.”
Improvisational tendencies notwithstanding, Florentin and her pals don’t intend to go wild with the source material.
“We are going to stick as closely as possible to the original song, and get as close as we can to the source of the music,” she says, adding that this also involves employing the right instrumental means to get the job done. “We use original instruments – of course, they are contemporary models. We have a harp from the early Renaissance, we have old percussion instruments, and the recorders I play are from the Renaissance. They are all copies of the original instruments.
We try to play in as close a way as possible to the original styles. That’s why we combine Ladino material with Spanish music from the 16th and 17th centuries.”
For tickets and more information: *6226, (02) 623-7000 or http://israelfestival.org/English.