Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MigrEnAb (Encoding, Absorption and Abandonment of Cultural Material during Migration: : The Case of Judeo-Spanish Songbooks)
Período documentado: 2020-04-01 hasta 2022-03-31
Since the 18th century throughout the Mediterranean basin Judeo-Spanish men and women have notated songs they want to remember in personal songbooks. Both Oriental (Ottoman Empire) and Occidental (North Africa & Gibraltar) Judeo-Spanish communities still have an enormous sung repertoire which plays a core function as identity marker. It is also centrally positioned for symbolic roles and gender negotiations. Historically, this repertoire was notated in songbooks which were created both for personal use or for transmission to their descendants.
The porousness of repertoire found within these private books which function as objects of orality demonstrate the continued absorption and interpenetration of languages and cultural references during various centuries. Songbooks served as cultural reminders of the layered identities that Judeo-Spanish speakers sought to preserve. While keeping traditional repertoire, the writers of these songbooks simultaneously absorbed important musical elements from their surroundings, demonstrating a multiplicity of cultural codes that coexist dynamically. This continual construction of their seemingly opposing roles as preservers and innovators of repertoire breaks all attempts at strict regionalism, while ensuring that certain traditional specificities remain untouched and unchanged.
The scholarship on these songbooks and their content has only been done on an individual basis, focusing on philology or ethnomusicological issues regarding contrafacta. This project proposes a ground-breaking larger study, which will analyze the individual songbooks as parts of a larger pan-Mediterranean corpus of Judeo-Spanish songbooks. Through this study, I propose to elucidate transnational patterns of repertoire encoding, absorption and abandonment which can serve as a seminal theory for other mobile minority communities.
The porousness of repertoire found within these private books which function as objects of orality demonstrate the continued absorption and interpenetration of languages and cultural references during various centuries. Songbooks served as cultural reminders of the layered identities that Judeo-Spanish speakers sought to preserve. While keeping traditional repertoire, the writers of these songbooks simultaneously absorbed important musical elements from their surroundings, demonstrating a multiplicity of cultural codes that coexist dynamically. This continual construction of their seemingly opposing roles as preservers and innovators of repertoire breaks all attempts at strict regionalism, while ensuring that certain traditional specificities remain untouched and unchanged.
The scholarship on these songbooks and their content has only been done on an individual basis, focusing on philology or ethnomusicological issues regarding contrafacta. This project proposes a ground-breaking larger study, which will analyze the individual songbooks as parts of a larger pan-Mediterranean corpus of Judeo-Spanish songbooks. Through this study, I propose to elucidate transnational patterns of repertoire encoding, absorption and abandonment which can serve as a seminal theory for other mobile minority communities.
Through my work on the MigrEnAb project I established the groundbreaking theoretical intervention of “sontinuity.” Sontinuity is a way transmission is ensured through the sonic in communities facing dispersal, disruption and trauma. Sontinuity establishes a thread of continuity which remains unbroken by body-to-body connections established through ritual or vernacular singing of either simple or complex material. The bonds which are forged through shared knowledge and performance of simple pieces create the crucial nodes of social cohesion needed after migratory displacement. This is why so often songbooks were created by a writer who underwent migration themselves, later to be bequeathed to family members as they moved from one city/community/language to another. The songbooks became ‘objects of aurality’ and in their most extreme cases (such as A. Israel and B. Bentata) transmitted only the memory of a lost sonic knowledge. However, the project results demonstrate that the imprint of the memory of lost sonic knowledge still served as a manner of creating social bonds after complete memory loss. This bond-making through the object served its purpose for at least two subsequent generations.
The linkage of the use of voice – hand – type – microphone – ear provides a sort of mediatic map of the way Sephardim used technology in their “sontinuity” to ensure body to body transmission despite corporeal dislocations. This realization helped explain why most of the repertoire initially written in personal songbooks has been completely abandoned, dismissed and/or forgotten. However, the key and ground-breaking discovery that I made is that transmission and sontinuity is not based on textual transmission, nor on exact repertoire but on a sonic, gestural and timbral embedding for which the songs are but the vehicle. I found that linear memory transmitted through arborescent systems of knowledge transmission is only a piece of a larger societal system to ensure transmission of epistemologies of self which anchor the group into feasible manners of social cohesion. The other crucial element of the system relies on rhizomic multinodal and multidirectional modes of repertoire transmission which ensure that repetitive, cyclical and ritualised performative aspects of individual and group singing are enacted to embed group specific knowledge into conscious and subconscious manners of memory-making.
The project results successfully led to my arrival at a ground-breaking theoretical conclusion and formulation regarding manners of transmission in situations of migration, language loss, and diaspora. The project enabled me to coin a new theoretical term I called “sontinuity” which distils the complex way continuity is embedded within sound beyond textual and narrative basis.
Preliminary project results were disseminated to thousands of non-specialist audiences primarily through eight public interventions in a variety of formats and media.
The linkage of the use of voice – hand – type – microphone – ear provides a sort of mediatic map of the way Sephardim used technology in their “sontinuity” to ensure body to body transmission despite corporeal dislocations. This realization helped explain why most of the repertoire initially written in personal songbooks has been completely abandoned, dismissed and/or forgotten. However, the key and ground-breaking discovery that I made is that transmission and sontinuity is not based on textual transmission, nor on exact repertoire but on a sonic, gestural and timbral embedding for which the songs are but the vehicle. I found that linear memory transmitted through arborescent systems of knowledge transmission is only a piece of a larger societal system to ensure transmission of epistemologies of self which anchor the group into feasible manners of social cohesion. The other crucial element of the system relies on rhizomic multinodal and multidirectional modes of repertoire transmission which ensure that repetitive, cyclical and ritualised performative aspects of individual and group singing are enacted to embed group specific knowledge into conscious and subconscious manners of memory-making.
The project results successfully led to my arrival at a ground-breaking theoretical conclusion and formulation regarding manners of transmission in situations of migration, language loss, and diaspora. The project enabled me to coin a new theoretical term I called “sontinuity” which distils the complex way continuity is embedded within sound beyond textual and narrative basis.
Preliminary project results were disseminated to thousands of non-specialist audiences primarily through eight public interventions in a variety of formats and media.
Analysis of the full corpus was done implementing a methodology using epistemological material from within the community using structural knowledge from the Talmud and Jewish mystical writings from the immediate aftermath of the expulsion from Spain into the Sephardi Mediterranean diaspora. The finalized analysis of the corpus with the new methodology found that textual linearity, which has often been considered as standard in analysis of songbooks and repertorisation does not fit within the epistemological structures of this community’s priorities of transmission and that transtextual and sonic transmission is their manner of implementing knowledge transfer.
The gender dimension was implemented to arrive to the innovation of analysis of content, and groundbreaking conclusions explaining how male songbooks follow a personal and arborescent linear pattern of transmission, whereas the women’s songbooks primarily follow a rhizomic and familial networked pattern of transmission. This explains the lack of overlap between men’s songbooks in Judeo-Spanish, in contrast to the highly overlapping songbooks of liturgical poetry in Hebrew. Whereas women’s Judeo-Spanish songbooks demonstrate large elements of repertoire overlap because of the different gendered use and functionality
The proposal of a new theoretical concept of "Sontinuity" and the arborescent and rhizomic interpenetrated manners of communal transmission incorporating material from post-expulsion textual developments which transferred into the epistemologies behind the notation of songbooks is beyond the state of the art. Understanding that women use transmission of oral material in different manners (socially networked in intimate spaces) than men (socially networked in liturgical spaces) demonstrates the difference between vernacular and interpenetrated oralities with the communities of contact operated in a gendered manner.
The gender dimension is present throughout the research and was fundamental to the conclusions reached between men’s and women’s use of songbooks for transmission and communal cohesion, contrasting arborescent and rhizomic manners of repertoire transmission. These results demonstrate the theoretical innovation that is possible when including a gendered analysis of the content.
The groundbreaking results from this project will be communicated to governmental bodies dealing with continuity of group cohesion through sound in situations of migration, dispersion and trauma.
The gender dimension was implemented to arrive to the innovation of analysis of content, and groundbreaking conclusions explaining how male songbooks follow a personal and arborescent linear pattern of transmission, whereas the women’s songbooks primarily follow a rhizomic and familial networked pattern of transmission. This explains the lack of overlap between men’s songbooks in Judeo-Spanish, in contrast to the highly overlapping songbooks of liturgical poetry in Hebrew. Whereas women’s Judeo-Spanish songbooks demonstrate large elements of repertoire overlap because of the different gendered use and functionality
The proposal of a new theoretical concept of "Sontinuity" and the arborescent and rhizomic interpenetrated manners of communal transmission incorporating material from post-expulsion textual developments which transferred into the epistemologies behind the notation of songbooks is beyond the state of the art. Understanding that women use transmission of oral material in different manners (socially networked in intimate spaces) than men (socially networked in liturgical spaces) demonstrates the difference between vernacular and interpenetrated oralities with the communities of contact operated in a gendered manner.
The gender dimension is present throughout the research and was fundamental to the conclusions reached between men’s and women’s use of songbooks for transmission and communal cohesion, contrasting arborescent and rhizomic manners of repertoire transmission. These results demonstrate the theoretical innovation that is possible when including a gendered analysis of the content.
The groundbreaking results from this project will be communicated to governmental bodies dealing with continuity of group cohesion through sound in situations of migration, dispersion and trauma.