Aron
Saltiel - Kantigas de boda Project
Boda,
Sephardic Wedding Songs
Turkish-Austrian native Ladino speaker
and singer Aron Saltiel and Ensemble Saltiel presents
a program of recently collected and recorded rare Sephardic
wedding music.
This is a unique opportunity to experience the repertoire
of a traditional Turkish Sephardic wedding – songs
and music from the engagement, the preparation of the dowry
and the trading of gifts, to the drawing up of the marriage
contract, the ceremony and the subsequent week. The songs
themselves were historically sung within the Istanbul-based
Saltiel family. As a veteran researcher of this repertoire
who grew up in the community, Aron is both an authority
on the music and a great performer.
Accompanied by hugely famous Turkish and Roma virtuosos
at the forefront of modern Turkish pop and folk music, Ensemble
Saltiel recalls the historic collaboration of a capella
singing combined with instruments such as oud, kanun (harp),
zurna (Turkish oboe) kemenche (bowed lyre), clarinet, violin,
darabuka (drum) and tambourine. The music is lush, nuanced
and intricately interwoven with mesmerizing taksim (explorative
instrumental improvisations).
 Presentations
of Sephardic music and culture have historically been underrepresented
within the American Jewish community, as the majority of this
population is Ashkenazi, tracing its roots to Eastern Europe
rather than Sephardi (from Spain, via North Africa, the Balkans
or the Middle East) or Mizrahi, such as Iraq or Iran. It is
not often that a program of this quality is available, one
that combines in one person extraordinary teaching and performing
skills with the resource of a native Ladino speaker who has
a rare repertoire, based on extensive fieldwork. This will
be the American premiere.
Aron
Saltiel’s project involves traditional Sephardic repertoire
of wedding songs ("Kantigas de boda") originating
in the Spanish (Ladino) speaking Jewish communities of Northern
Greece, Bulgaria, Republic of Macedonia and Turkey. These
songs accompany different phases of the wedding feast, including
the exhibition of the dowry, the bride’s passage to and return
from the mikvah, the blessing of the couple by their elders,
the dancing and rejoicing, and the bride’s entrance to the
bridegroom’s house. Accompanying the Ladino texts is music
influenced by the liturgical modes of hazanut as well as by
Macedonian and Turkish wedding tunes, often played at weddings
by Roma musicians. This repertoire of wedding songs is no
longer part of the cultural life of the community. Saltiel
collected most of the songs during his fieldwork for the Sephardic
Songbook (in cooperation with Joshua Horowitz, published C.
F. Peters, Frankfurt) in the Sephardic communities in Sarajevo,
Salonica, Istanbul and Batyam in the years 1975 to 1988, where
he encountered several informants who remembered the music
of "the old days." It is the goal of this project
to document and present this cultural treasure of the Jewish
Ottoman heritage before it is completely forgotten.
Aron Saltiel’s music embodies the depth
of his experiences. His concerts are inspired, always with an
ear toward bringing people of diverse backgrounds together.
His concerts intersperse humorous anecdotes with subtly molded
music, and include Turkish, Greek, and Bulgarian Sephardic music.
Based in Graz, Austria, Aron Saltiel was born in the Ladino-speaking
community of Istanbul of descendants of Sephardic Jews exiled
from Spain in 1492. His first contact with Sephardic and Turkish
music was in his home, where he absorbed the singing of his
grandparents. Later he learned that many of the songs she sang
to him were shared by Turks, Jews and Greeks, which led him
to explore the galvanizing potential of music in these languages
and cultures. Aron is still acknowledged as one of the world's
experts on Sephardic music, and has served as advisor and radio
producer for both Jewish and Islamic music for Austrian national
Radio (ORF) and West German Radio (WDR). His musical interests
led him to study voice with Hedda Szamosi in Vienna, following
which he founded the group, Alondra with Marie-Thérèse
Escribano and Wolfram Märzendorfer. Although the term and
precepts of "World Music" would not take hold until
the late 1980s, throughout the early 1980s Alondra offered concerts
dedicated to the performance of Jewish music. Their concerts
were seen as path-forging, and brought them invitations to renowned
festivals such as the Steierische Herbst Festival, Graz, the
Wiener Festwochen, the Semana de Musica Antigua, Burgos, the
Festival des Arts Traditionnels,Rennes.
Saltiel returned to his family home in Turkey in summer, 2009
with his daughter Rivka, also a singer, to arrange the music
for this project and rehearse with a group of musicians familiar
with the style and musical dialect of the tunes. Working with
a group of exceptional musicians from the Istanbul music scene,
"Boda, Sephardic Wedding Songs" was recorded and released
in August 2010.
Boda, Sephardic Wedding Songs
Musicians: Aron & Rivka Saltiel (vocals) and a 5-member
band from Istanbul (kanun, clarinet, oud, violin & percussion)
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