Persistence and Transformation of a Sephardi - Penitential Hymn under Changing Environmental Conditions

The comparison of a great number of variants of a folk melody was undertaken by Bela Bartok at the beginning of the century, and continued by his school. At about the same time, A. Z. Idelsohn made some early steps in the same direction when, in the early twenties, he confronted different local variants of Jewish Sephardi melodies. He confined himself to very few, often no more than a pair of specimens, but, nevertheless, ventured upon the comparison of tunes influenced by different music cultures. Idelsohn did not content himself with the statement that the same tune persisted in widely separated Sephardi communities, but he also pointed to cases of transformation. His line has recently been taken up by several students of Jewish music tradition.

We are now in a better position than was the pioneer of Jewish ethnomusicology two generations ago. A considerable number of tunes with many variant versions has been recorded and put at our disposal. For many Sephardi melodies we can unfold a map of variants reaching from Bagdad to Casablanca, from Salonica to Leghorn, from Amsterdam and London to Bayonne as far as to the Sephardi outposts in the New World. This is what we shall do in the present investigation, developing methods for gathering information from sixty divergent versions of the same song.