The Music of the Amsterdam Sephardim: A Musicological Survey

A short introduction describes the historical background of the Sephardic tradition and reviews some facts about Jewish poets and religious poetry during the Golden Age in Spain and Portugal (eleventh-fourteenth centuries). This overview is crucial to a better understanding of the music sung by the Sephardic community that arrived in Amsterdam at the end of the sixteenth century. In the Sephardic tradition, chazzanut is a matter of correctness without improvisation, the keeping of and adherence to the cantorial tradition. However, chazzanim of the Iberian peninsula were also poets of liturgical and semi-liturgical poetry. Finally, the article focuses on the liturgical hymns of the High Holy Days and the art music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Without real borders between them, both liturgical and secular music have had their place in the Sephardic musical life of Amsterdam.