SEPHARDIC MUSIC:
A CENTURY OF RECORDINGS

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Modern Discography (Sample)

This site currently provides survey articles covering the first hundred years of recorded Sephardic music, and then focuses intensively on 78-era recordings, songs, artists and labels. A future version could provide similar in-depth coverage of "modern era" recordings, i.e., LPs, cassettes, CDs, and now, downloads too. (Click here if you would like to support this effort!) Eventually this site will offer information on over 2,000 recordings and over 10,000 song samples, covering virtually the entire recorded corpus of Sephardic music. This appendix provides a sample of what the entire site could some day offer, by focusing in detail on the popular Sephardic song A la una and its recordings. I selected A la una for several reasons:

• It represents over 1% of all recorded Sephardic songs (perhaps exceeded only by Cuando el Rey Nimrod and Los Bilbilicos)
• Its popularity has held up consistently for decades. (1)
• I was able to support research by Professsor Edwin Seroussi into the song's history by providing over 125 different version.

Song Research

The site will list research into particular songs. For A la Una the most detailed study is surely Edwin Seroussi's "From Spain to the Eastern Mediterranean and Back: A Song as a Metaphor of Modern Sephardi Culture" It painstakingly recounts a history of the song's two principal versions, exemplified in recordings by Haim Effendi ♪ and Gloria Levy ♪. Other research includes Attias, 1972 and Katz, 1995.

Sample Lyrics

A la una yo naci
A las dos me engrandecí
A las tres tenía amante
A las cuatro me casí.
Me casí con un amor

Dime niña donde vienes
Que te quiero conocer
Y si tu no tienes amante
Yo te haré defender

Yéndome para la guerra
Dos bezos al aire di
El uno es para mi madre
Y el otro para ti

Joaquín Díaz, Romanzas y Cantigas Sefardies

Printed Arrangements

Sources

Seroussi
WorldCat
Author's collection

Controlled Vocabulary

Future users of this site may only know one name for the song that interests them, yet should be able to locate all versions of that song. (I define "versions of a song" to mean songs that share either a melody or substantial lyrics.) To do this, the comprehensive discography will use what librarians call a "controlled vocabulary" that ties together all variants of the song name. Without a controlled vocabulary, there is literally no chance that even expert searchers could find all a song's versions – including one in Polish! – as the following table should make clear.

Song Title Variants for A la Una in Commercial Recordings

Searching on "una" alone would find most but by no means all performances of the song, and meanwhile users would have to comb through many unrelated song performances (Al rio de una fuente, En una casa chica, etc.)

Exemplary Searches

Users should be able to search on different parameters. Searching for releases by decade dramatically illustrates the accelerating number of commercial releases with Sephardic songs:

A search on all 78 rpm recordings would result in the following:

Where applicable we could also list notable early non-commercial versions, such as one by Isaac Algazi. (2)

The next link illustrates a search by date, such as recordings up to 1980. And if you can't get enough of the song, here are over 125 versions, most with samples. Choose either the entire results list (LONG!) or pick any of the ten pages below, sorted by the performing group or artist's name.

Notes

Copyright 2008 - 2012, Joel Bresler
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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