Workshop in preparation for Journal Yod special issue

In mid January 2022, while many of us were still faced with the impossibility of travel and in person meetings due to the Omicron variant of Covid, MigrEnAb was honoured to host some of the foremost scholars in Judeo-Spanish language, cancioneros and music to a closed workshop in preparation for our special issue of the journal Yod. Spanning a 13 hour time difference from Perth, Australia (Seth Kunin, Curtin University contributing on a Crypto-Jewish Songbook from New Mexico) to the East Coast of North America with Toronto (Judith Cohen, York University on an ethnomusicologist's songbook), Philadelphia (Edwin Seroussi, Hebrew U with the volume's epilogue) and North Georgia during an ice storm (Pamela Sezgin contributing on the Besso songbook), the format allowed us the time and joint conversation that we rarely have when preparing a volume.

The authors discussed issues of their own relationships to the object of research, and the variety of reasons for notation, choices of inclusion or exclusion as well as elision and loss of the objects themselves and often the repertoire. Interestingly, issues of canonisation and the consequences of various sorts of ruptures such as migration, modernity and new media technology on notators and performers, as well as individual choices and performances were alluded to repeatedly, demonstrating unities beyond the geopolitical and temporal distance between the objects and repertoires.

Participating were:

Angy Cohen, University of Calgary, Canada

Seth Kunin, Curtin University, Australia

Judith Cohen, York University, Canada

Rivka Havassy, Salti Institute for Ladino Studies, Bar Ilan University, Israel

Pam Sezgin, University of North Georgia, USA

Renato Kamhi, Sorbonne, IReMus, France

Hilary Pomeroy, University College London, GB

David Bunis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Edwin Seroussi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Shoshana Weich Shahak, Jewish Music Research Center, Israel

Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, INALCO, Sorbonne Paris Cité, France

The special issue for Yod will be ready and available through open access during the course of 2022. We will have a public event after the issue's publication. Stay tuned.