Sephardic Music and Its Connections to Spain and Portugal

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2016 01:00PM - Thu, Aug 18, 2016 02:00PM
Price: Free with Museum admission. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the lecture or can be pre-booked online.

Discover the roots and development of Sephardic music with ethnomusicologist and traditional singer Dr. Judith Cohen (York University).

Dr. Judith Cohen is an ethnomusicologist, medievalist and singer. A Montrealer, she has lived in Toronto for many years and teaches in the music department of York University. She is internationally known for her research, publications and performances of traditional Sephardic songs, and songs of the Sephardic diaspora in the Balkans, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Morocco — and French Canada. Dr Cohen has also conducted fieldwork for two decades among the Crypto-Jews of rural Portugal, and is the editor and consultant for the 1952 Spain field recordings of the legendary Alan Lomax, whose Spanish journals she is currently editing. Her work with Sephardic and related music reflects her earlier research on women and music in the three religious communities of medieval Iberia. Alongside her scholarly work, she continues to perform and give workshops on the music traditions she studies.