The sephardi repertoire and its musico-poetic genres

Abstract

In the communities that the Jews expelled from Spain established in their new diasporas, the Sephardi Jews preserved the memory of Medieval Spain. For five centuries they kept alive the language that they had spoken in the different regions of the Iberian Peninsula where they lived before their “exodus” and later on incorporated words and expressions from the languages of the peoples among whom they lived. They also preserved the musical repertoire that they brought from Spain and they transmitted it orally from generation to generation. This article deals with the three main genres that constitute the Judeo- Spanish musico-poetic repertoire: the Romancero, Coplas and Cancionero, presenting the criteria for their classification and pointing out the specific characteristics of each of them. Being the Romancero the genre with the deepest Hispanic roots, we offer here some concordances between the Sephardi Romancero and the romances collected from the oral tradition in Galicia.