Normally I do not respond to comments posted on websites to which I contribute unless they raise interesting questions or discussion topics. All too often comments are posted by self-appointed experts and various other cranks and are best left in obscurity. Occasionally a comment is so out of place, so egregiously offensive, so arrogant and ignorant, that it demands a rebuttal. Such is the case with a comment made by one Ms. Judith Cohen, a contributor to the website Klezmershack. I have now had some time to do some work on the issue and feel a rebuttal is appropriate.
Ms. Cohen:
Since you have taken it upon yourself to comment on my “research,” I shall take this opportunity to reciprocate and comment on yours. It is a universally accepted research protocol to read an item with some care before publishing a criticism of it. That is hardly an onerous task when commenting on a blog posting of far less than 1,000 words. The comment you posted shows that you did not read, or at least did not understand, the heading “A BLOG INTENDED FOR PARTICIPANTS IN THE COURSE ON PILGRIMAGE OFFERED AT ALRI IN AUTUMN 2009. THE BLOG PRESENTS MATERIALS GERMANE TO THE COURSE INCLUDING SESSION OUTLINES, ILLUSTRATIVE MATTER,AND OTHER MATERIALS ENROLEES MIGHT FIND OF INTEREST” a clear statement that the blog is solely written for participants enrolled in a specific course on a specific topic. Neither have you read nor understood the initial sentence of the brief posting you so arrogantly dismiss. In that paragraph I state ‘While it is a bit remote from the specific topic of pilgrimage, in our meeting on Tuesday a question was asked about Ladino music, and I was intrigued enough to do a little research.” That statement should amply indicate to any one of normal intelligence that 1) I am not claiming to be an expert, indeed that I am a novice, an interested outsider, seeking additional information about a largely unfamiliar subject and 2) the posting is based on the research that can be done in a small amount of time.
Ladino music is remote from the course I am teaching and equally remote from my personal interests. The brief blog posting was for the benefit of students in the course (read the heading above!) who expressed an interest in the subject of Ladino music. It was neither intended as a general guide to the subject for all who might stumble upon it nor as an incitement for some self-appointed expert to expel venom. The student’s questions sparked in me a personal interest and a desire to learn a little more about Ladino music and to share my findings with members of the class I am leading. As an instructor I try to bring to the attention of my students those new and interesting ideas and topics I have encountered, especially when a student raises a question or otherwise expresses an interest in a topic. The informality of a blog eases that task and allows for the exploration of new fields and ideas outside the formal constraints of the classroom.
Contempt for novices wishing to learn a bit more about a subject is frequently expressed by “experts,” almost always either those with significant lacunae in their own knowledge or those who have a strong commitment to promoting unimportant trivialities, topics and ideas dismissed by serious scholars. The contempt arises, I suspect, out of a fear the outsider may discover the emperor indeed has no clothes. I have always found true scholars, those with genuine expertise on a topic and a passion for it, to be genial hosts when novices wish to explore.
I did not make and would never have made the patently absurd claim that Ladino music is solely that developed in Iberia during the middle ages. As anyone who has studied European culture and history or musicology is well aware, no western musical genre surviving more than a few years is static, no matter how insignificant it may be to the evolution of music or of culture overall. Even those dying genres leading to cultural dead ends degenerate enroute to their demise. The Ladino genre is more than a half-millennium old and most certainly has evolved, for better or for worse. I merely suggested its origin was in medieval Iberia, and a good place to begin an examination is to listen to recordings of that early music made by first-rate musicians. I am sure any respectable musicologist would consider listening to representative examples of its early music as a reasonable, if not the ideal, starting point for a more thorough investigation of a genre.
Shortly after beginning a search for materials on Ladino music on various websites and in several library catalogues (including, among others, the Library of Congress, Johns Hopkins University, and George Mason University’s library which is accessible to my students) I discovered, as any competent scholar doing serious research on the topic would soon discover, that Sephardic (or Sefardic) is the usual catalogue term pointing to sources of early Ladino music. At the same time that term, also used in catalogues of recordings for sale, points to more recent expressions. For an example, search the term “Ladino music” on Wikipedia, of which more below.
If you wish to learn something about the subject of Ladino music, you would profit from a Google or Bing internet search and a search on one or more of the many university and research library catalogues available online. Entering “Ladino Music” as a search term, you will find most items linked to that term, including the ones on the first few results pages, go directly to Sephardic (various spellings) topics and primarily discuss the music of the 1492 Diaspora and its medieval precursors. In comparison, those sources give relatively few references on the evolution of the music since those early years, suggesting to an interested outsider that much of the subsequent development was inconsequential, perhaps even a trail leading to a cultural dead end. Library research using printed materials further indicated that most scholars devote their efforts to the early years. My motivation, in retrospect clearly misguided, for including a reference to Klezmershack’s page on the topic was its inclusion of more recent examples of the genre. Very few of the other web sites I encountered provided that information, suggesting yet again that post Diaspora Ladino music is little more than a minor component of a moribund and dying folk culture, albeit one that persisted for a long time.
The statement about Savall and company is absurd; a suggestion to me that one who writes such a comment either knows very little about music and performance practice or else has a personal axe to grind. Eminent musicologists, experts in medieval, renaissance and baroque music, consider the performance practices of Savall and his collaborators to be excellent resulting in the closest possible approximations of the manner in which the music was originally performed given present day knowledge and materials. It is beyond belief that Savall and his collaborators would deviate from their rigorous adherence to authentic performance for just one type of music.
Given my reservations, all of them deriving from your comment, I have edited my original posting to withdraw the recommendation of Klezmershack and the page on Ladino music it includes. I do not have the time, the need or the interest to further evaluate that site. A careful review might prove it to be acceptable, but my reservations about its quality and scholarship, if indeed there was any, mean I cannot recommend it to my students. In its place I am inserting a link to the Wikipedia entry found when searching for “Ladino music,” a search which immediately links one to the online encyclopedia’s posting on Sefardic music. Despite the well-known issues with Wikipedia, I find it likely to be a more credible source of information on the topic than is Klezmershack.
Having already devoted too much time to finding and reading materials on Ladino music and listening to some recordings of more recent examples of the genre, I am leaving the topic, never to return. After considerable research effort and review of a substantial body of material, I find Ladino music has no relevance to my interests in music or to the development of western European or more general world culture. If a future student should ask about it, I will reply “Ladino music existed. Look it up in Wikipedia.” Aside from the wonderful performances of authentic early exemplars by Savall and his collaborators (and those of several other first-rate early music groups), my foray into learning more about Ladino music has led to the inescapable conclusions that post Diaspora Ladino music is unpleasant to listen to, at least for ears tuned to European and Asian music; it is of little consequence in the overall evolution of human cultures; and its only strong interest is to pseudo-scholars fixated on antiquarian trivia and to those obsessed with an inconsequential element of a marginal folk culture facing imminent extinction. Life is too short to pursue information about cultural dead ends and antiquarian trivialities. There are countless musical topics of greater interest and importance, perhaps early Bavarian bagpipe music or Bronze Age pan pipes in Greece. At least those genres did contribute to ongoing forms of world culture.
E. O. Pederson, Ph.D.
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