Songs from the Sephardic tradition
and an approach to associated repertoires
NOVEMBER 16 to 18, 2024
CONTEXT
Unlike other musical traditions, Judeo-Spanish songs do not constitute a homogeneous stylistic whole. This diversity, which is due to their history, the many geographical areas in which they have developed and the many influences that run through them, leaves performers with a great deal of freedom, but this freedom must be part of a coherent framework that is faithful to the spirit that animates them.
PURPOSE
Learn about the poetic and musical world of Judeo-Spanish songs and their diversity, taking into account the historical, sociological and geographical context in which they are set.
Through a selection of songs that enable the different branches of the repertoire and their specific features to be approached (from romances with their origins in medieval Spain to kantigas born in Salonika or Istanbul in the 20th century, from secular love songs to coplas set to the rhythms of religious festivals), incorporate specific work on the rhythms and modes at the heart of this musical tradition.
TEACHING APPROACH
- Sandra Bessis will be studying various songs from the repertoire, alternating between group learning and individual performance.
- Marc Loopuyt, ‘explorer and creator in traditional music’, oud player and specialist in Oriental music, will be present on the afternoons of 20 October and all day on 21 October, with this part of the workshop devoted more specifically to his specific approach to rhythms.
- Marc will be proposing a work called OUSSOUL, which is fundamental to the transmission of music from the Maghreb and the Near East. For the apprentice musician, this involves synchronising the melody with the corresponding body percussion. This synchronisation, which is that of traditional composers, writes the tunes deeply and fluidly into the dynamic memory of singers and musicians.
- This method, which will be approached through the Sephardic songs covered on the first day and a half, also provides natural access to modal improvisation on the best-known rhythmic modes, both bets and odd.
- Marc Loopuyt taught this method at the ENM in Villeurbanne for many years.
As the workshop is essentially oral, no knowledge of music reading is required. However, as far as possible, the scores of the songs studied will be distributed.
Some time may be devoted to listening to and analysing different interpretations of songs using sound extracts. You can bring your own recording equipment, particularly to help you make the songs your own from one day to the next.
CONTENTS
- Body preparation: relaxation of the body and awareness of any blockages, anchoring and fluidity of movement.
- Listening, availability, interiorisation and concentration, presence to oneself and to the audience.
- Vocal warm-up: work on flexibility and agility, ornamentation and melismas, according to the songs being sung and respecting the modes.
- Work on some Judeo-Spanish songs from the different branches of the repertoire: romances from the Spanish medieval tradition, kantigas, coplas.
- Work on the language: prosody, pronunciation, the words you wish to emphasise according to their meaning and the emotion you wish to convey.
- Work on integrating rhythms (in the body and through digital percussion for those who already play an instrument): singing while accompanying yourself.
TIMETABLE: 10.00 am – 1.00 pm // 2.00 pm – 4.00 pm
CONDITIONS OF PARTICIPATION
- Good singing practice and interest in the repertoire covered in its diversity (no theoretical knowledge necessary).
- Open to amateurs and professionals, score readers and non-readers alike.
- Even limited familiarity with the Judeo-Spanish language (or Spanish) will save time and make you feel more at ease.
- If possible, bring a percussion instrument (frame drum such as bendir, daf, tambourine).
- Instrumentalists are welcome to accompany and/or play the instrumental interludes of the songs.
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BIOGRAPHY
Sandra bessis
Born Tunisian, Sandra Bessis lived successively in her native country and various countries before settling in France, where she has lived since the age of 18.
Parallel to her literary university studies, she studied singing, first with Suzy Sachs, later with Françoise Semellaz.
For several decades, she has been travelling the territory of Sephardic songs and Mediterranean music, performing on many stages and festivals, both in France and abroad, also working on various creations with other artists, on the theme of the encounter between the musical traditions of the Mediterranean basin.
Her first CD, from distant Spain, was released in 1992. With flutist John Mac Lean, she wanders through the repertoire of Judeo-Spanish songs, giving free rein to creativity and fantasy, playing on timbres and instruments.
Her fourth CD, Entre deux rives, is the result of a “live” recording at the Synagogue of Carpentras, with Rachid Brahim-Djelloul and Anello Capuano. Released in 2005, it acts as a kind of return to the roots, crossing Sephardic songs and other songs of the Mediterranean, Arab-Andalusian in particular.
In 2006, she created in Paris, with Rachid Brahim-Djelloul and Noureddine Aliane, a show mixing fragments of tales, Bouqalat, popular poems of the women of Algiers, fragments of stories, history, punctuating romances, kantigas and mouwachahat.
Wandering playing on the registers spoken, sung, played, traveling again the paths of transmission, from one shore to the other of the Mediterranean.
With the ensemble Naguila, she participates in the voyage de Sefarad, a show created in Montpellier in December 2009.
From 2010 to 2013 she was one of the two singers invited to Bratsch’s latest creation, Orient mon Amour, melodies and poems from the Mediterranean shores. The show, which brings together 17 musicians around the poet Salah el Hamdani, was hosted between 2010 and 2013 by many French national stages.
Inhabited by the taste for words, the unveiling of the intimate word, she co-created in 2013 at the Théâtre de l’Epée de Bois, at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, with Mireille Diaz-Florian and accordionist Jasko Ramic, the reading in music : Tout chose au monde m’est nouvelle, texts and poems by Aimé Césaire, Mahmoud Darwish, Saint John Perse, Anna Seghers, Sophie Bessis, Nancy Huston and Leïla Sebbar, and signs a little later a solo show between words and music, staging, in voice, a woman letting rise in her traces, shadows and perfumes of the Mare Nostrum, echoes and romances of the exiles, and some figures of women. Since 2015, this show, playing on intimacy with the public, has been hosted more than forty times in France and Italy.
Cordoba 21 – In the footsteps of Sefarad , released in 2014, is his fifth CD dedicated to these repertoires.
She brings around her Rachid Brahim-Djelloul on violin and voice, Noureddine Aliane on ‘oud, mandola, Jasko Ramic on accordion, Yousef Zayed on percussion and bouzouk, Théo Girard on double bass and Araik Bakhtikian on doudouk ; for a new musical journey, free wandering in the Mediterranean Sea, playing with languages and their respective identities.
In December 2022, still at the Cartoucherie, with actress Fatima Soualhia Manet and musician Marius Pibarot, she staged Ce que leur dit les anges, a musical reading she conceived by bringing together the texts of Annemarie Schwartzenbach, writer-traveler who died prematurely in 1944, and singer-poet Patti Smith.
Her concerts are an invitation to travel into the musical universe drawing on the sources of medieval Andalusia, then continuing to walk in the Easts that inherited its decomposition, as it resonates for us, here and now.
“Ample voice, shivering declamation, Sandra Bessis carries, in distant heritage, the Judeo-Spanish song of Muslim Andalusia … Its song actually embraces the whole Mediterranean, because it is nomadic and ornamented.” Liberation
marc loopuyt
Biography on his website : https://marcloopuyt.com/biographie/
Marc LOOPUYT began his journey as a traditional musician at the irrepressible invitation of the flamenco guitar, which he began studying at the age of 14. After a long stay in Andalusia, having tasted the untempered intervals of the ‘cante jondo flamenco’, he crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and studied the oud in the Maghreb tradition.
This was followed by several years in Fez, bastion of the Arabo-Andalusian tradition, with Abdelkrim RAÏS and Ustad MASSANO. Then came the call of the Orient itself: Arabia, the Gulf, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and finally Turkey, where he befriended the great oud master Cinuçen TANRIKORUR, who helped him systematise his exploration of melodic archetypes: the art of the maqam. This long musical journey through the Orient and the Maghreb enabled Marc LOOPUYT to develop his own style from a number of highly effective musical sources.
His concerts as an Oriental lute soloist are based on the theme of the Orients of the Lute (see the 3 CDs under the same title published by BUDA).
He founded the group Suspiro del Moro and worked on the theme of the ‘Two Andalusias’, the musical mysteries shared by the two shores of the Straits of Gibraltar.
He defends the ancient aspects of the flamenco tradition by playing on a seventeenth-century guitar.
He has recorded two critically acclaimed solo CDs (2 Choc au Monde de la Musique, Diapason d’Or) and two CDs with Suspiro del Moro (Diapason d’Or and Choc au Monde de la Musique). He took part in the CD ‘À la Croisée des Chemins’, Grand prix de l’Académie Charles Cros, and the Radio France International CD ‘Transversales’.
At the same time, he defends the musical tradition by producing and directing the production of 8 CDs by the great Masters with whom he learned: 3 for the OCORA Radio France collection and 5 for BUDA Musiques du Monde. Most of these CDs have also won critical acclaim (2 Choc au Monde de la Musique, 3 F Télérama, etc.).
He holds a C.A. from the E.N.M. in Villeurbanne, and from the Mediterranean Music Department that he runs, he has initiated an original way of working in neighbourhoods: nomadic concerts based on a forum developed around North African weaving looms. He also teaches at the conservatoires in Toulouse and Narbonne.
In 2000, the 3rd volume of Orients du Luth, a solo CD, was released; in 2001, the CD ‘Les deux Andalousies’ was recorded. Marc LOOPUYT was awarded the Villa Médicis: he spent 1 year in the Caucasus creating a new show entitled Mountain of Fire.
He worked with Malik Mansurov, grand master of the Baku tar, and with the singer Agha Karim, then recorded the CD ‘Mugam du Grand Caucase’ (BUDA) with them. He then collaborated with Elshan Mansur, ov, master of the kamantché, and recorded the CD ‘Yanar dar’ with him (BUDA).
In 2004, he gave a concert at the Théâtrre de la Ville in Paris with Agha Karim and Elshan Mansurov. From 2005, he was a regular member of Rafik Rustamov’s group, Les Rossignols du Karabagh.
In 2006, for the Festival des Musiques anciennes d’Ambronay, he put together a programme of historical Turkish music (Les Transfuges Ottomans) with Selçuk Ererslan k.emantchist of Radio Istanbul.
In 2009, he created a performance in Izmir in which the art of the Ebru (marbled paper) and the art of the oud combined their improvisations. Performed at the Lille Festival in 2010 and at Les Confluences in Lyon in 2017.
At the same time, and on an early 18th-century flamenco guitar, he developed a new concept on the theme of the relationship between Scarlatti’s Sonatas for Harpsichord and early flamenco, which provided the theme for his latest CD in 2007 with Catherine Latzarus and Laura Clemente: ‘Flamenco Barroco’.
After ‘Un troubadour de Constantine’ with Salim Fergani, 35 years of musical friendship with Ahmed Shiki from Fez enabled him to initiate and produce a double CD that puts the system of 24 Moroccan Arabo-Andalusian modes in order.
After many concerts with his son Thomas over the years, they produced an oud duet on CD recorded on a Nagra tape for maximum sound quality.
2013: Acte Public (Lyon) publishes a double DVD: ‘Portrait d’un Amoureux des Luths et des Orients’ evoking the intimacy of his art.
2015: Double CD compilation: a selection of 24 tracks from 8 CDs is published by BUDA Records: a good overview of his wide range of horizons.
2017: He is the guest of honour of the review ‘Horizons Maghrébins’ Presses Universitaires du Midi.
He is working on a systematisation of his knowledge of Eastern musical modes based on the Arbre des Modes model (CD and article forthcoming).
For the past 4 years, he has made numerous annual visits to Morocco and Egypt to pass on his knowledge to young people (Association Al Mounia Marrakech and Halqa in Cairo).