“Los Bilbilikos Kantan”: Contemporary Transmission of Sephardic Music

Abstract

Landing on the intersection of three disciplines—music education, ethnomusicology, and Sephardic Jewish studies—this study examines the diverse transmission processes of Sephardic Jewish music, including learning methods, teaching approaches, oral/aural transmission through various media, and material cultures, to understand how music is inherited, sustained, and evolved in the transmission processes. While Sephardic people had been often marginalized in the new society as a minority group, they encapsulated the core heritage of their own culture but at the same time also absorbed and sometimes even preserved other cultures in geographical proximity along the migration routes. From within the Sephardic community toward a network of world artists, Sephardic music has been transmitted through human interactions, recorded media, online communication platforms, as well as a few printed anthologies with music notations.This dissertation documents the current transmission processes of Sephardic music through hybrid ethnographic fieldwork in physical locations including Seattle (WA, U.S.), the Iberian Peninsula, Istanbul (Turkey), and Israel, and virtual fieldwork through online social media. Focusing on four musician-educators from diverse cultural backgrounds in each of the four geographical locations, this research compares to the Five-Domain Framework of Music Sustainability with evidence gathered through interviews, observations, participatory learning, and performance experiences to present the landscape of contemporary transmission of Sephardic music that is primarily through oral/aural channels and supplemented with commercial recordings and archival documents, circulated among worldwide musicians beyond the Sephardic communities.