The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Liturgy

Few Jewish liturgical music traditions have been as consistently maintained as were those of the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish congregations, also known as Western Sephardi. The exceptionally small size of these communities and their concentration in very few urban centers in Western Europe and the Americas contributed to the remarkable, stability of their liturgical music. In addition the performers of this music, the hazzanim (cantors), belong to long and sometimes well-documented chains of transmission within specific families, another factor reinforcing stylistic consistency in the content and performance practice of the liturgical repertoire. The Spanish-Portuguese liturgical repertoire as it was maintained in the synagogues of Amsterdam, London and New York is presented and analyzed for the first time in its entirety by Essica Marks. Her work includes copious transcriptions based on original fieldwork as well as on rare printed music scores and manuscripts. Each piece is analyzed, offering an overall detailed description of the stylistic features of this unique and still unexplored Jewish musical tradition.

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