Uploaded July 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Oud by Oğüzhan Özkılıç, vocals by Kelareh Kabiri and Farya Faraji, arrangement by Farya Faraji. This is another song from the Sephardic musical repertoire, the community of Jews expelled from Iberia at the end of the Reconquista and who settled around the Mediterranean, principally in the Ottoman Empire.
The first challenge in providing an ethnomusicologically informed rendition is of Sephardic songs is determining what context the rendition should exemplify. Indeed, Sephardic music is a repertoire, not a style, which means it's a collection of shared songs, but the playing style is geographically determined: Serbian Sephardic Jews would have Serbian sounding music, those in Rhodes would have music sounding like Rhodes', etc. I decided my rendition would have the typological features of West Anatolian and Aegean music of circa the previous two centuries. Therefore, I used an oud, a saz, qanun, kaval, and percussions of the area. It's important to note that I'm unsure whether the song was actually performed in that region or not, as some songs were historically more localised and very few songs of the Sephardis actually date back to their common Iberian roots pre-dispersion.
Unlike most Sephardi songs, this one is not in the Ladino language, but instead in Hebrew, a language that was long dead, or rather dormant for much of Jewish history, and only survived has a liturgical and prestige language before being fully revived recently. The lyrics come from the Book of Songs.
Hebrew lyrics:
Kol dodi, kol dodi
Kol dodi hineh ze ba
M’kaltez al heharim
M’daleg al hagva’ot
English translation:
My lover's voice, my lover's voice,
My lover comes!
Leaping on the mountains,
Skipping on the valleys.
Oud by Oğüzhan Özkılıç, vocals by Kelareh Kabiri and Farya Faraji, arrangement by Farya Faraji. This is another song from the Sephardic musical repertoire, the community of Jews expelled from Iberia at the end of the Reconquista and who settled around the Mediterranean, principally in the Ottoman Empire.
The first challenge in providing an ethnomusicologically informed rendition is of Sephardic songs is determining what context the rendition should exemplify. Indeed, Sephardic music is a repertoire, not a style, which means it's a collection of shared songs, but the playing style is geographically determined: Serbian Sephardic Jews would have Serbian sounding music, those in Rhodes would have music sounding like Rhodes', etc. I decided my rendition would have the typological features of West Anatolian and Aegean music of circa the previous two centuries. Therefore, I used an oud, a saz, qanun, kaval, and percussions of the area. It's important to note that I'm unsure whether the song was actually performed in that region or not, as some songs were historically more localised and very few songs of the Sephardis actually date back to their common Iberian roots pre-dispersion.
Unlike most Sephardi songs, this one is not in the Ladino language, but instead in Hebrew, a language that was long dead, or rather dormant for much of Jewish history, and only survived has a liturgical and prestige language before being fully revived recently. The lyrics come from the Book of Songs.
Hebrew lyrics:
Kol dodi, kol dodi
Kol dodi hineh ze ba
M’kaltez al heharim
M’daleg al hagva’ot
English translation:
My lover's voice, my lover's voice,
My lover comes!
Leaping on the mountains,
Skipping on the valleys.
