The Valencian singer Mara Aranda presents her album ‘Sephardic Legacy’, dedicated to Sephardic repertorie at La Font de la Figuera, Valencia, Spain.
The album has been supervised and produced by Jota Martinez, specialist in “citola” and hurdy-gurdy applied to historical music. Other prestigious musicians have taken part in this project that approachs to the audience songs that have taken important part in social and cultural life of the people with different religions that lived together, alternating periods with more or less tolerance, during eight centuries, more than 24 generations, in the Hispanic-Jewish Sepharad, the Muslim Al-Andalus or the Christian Hispania.
Lots of examples of the Spanish-Jews’ way of living have remained and they reflect in their songs those traditions that were transmited orally from parents to sons and preserved during more than 500 years
after Jews’ expulsion. These songs tell us about their personal feelings, their celebrations, parties and rituals, about historical happenings connected with the Old Romancero, a jewel in the Spanish literature that accumulates a true manifestation of our History and it’s one of the most important representations of the oral literature of our people.There are several kind of songs included in the album and performed in the concerts: songs from the Eastern zone of the Diaspor, like the dramatic lullaby from Sofia (Bulgaria), ‘Nani Nani’, where the mother is sleeping her son while she sings about the infidelity and indifference of his father; other songs from nearer places of Iberian Peninsula, Northern Africa, like ‘D’oy en este dia’, a wedding kantika where the mother advise her daughter, whose wedding day is near.
In Sephardic Legacy we’ll find the sound of the instruments from medieval Spanish tradition, and others from Northern Africa tradition and the Eastern Mediterranean tradition too, following the example of the Sephardic people, who adapted their music to the own style and instruments of the zones they settled,always in constant evolution. Far from closing windows and doors to hide away that ancient inheritance, transmited from parent to sons, they opened them widely and this is why we can sing them nowdays and share them with all those History, music and tradition lovers.
