Songs of Love and Loss, Heartbreak and Hope: Women in Sephardic Song

In the summer of 1492, tens of thousands of Spanish Jews trudged sorrowfully toward the country’s ports and borders as more than a millennium of Jewish presence in Spain came to an end. Observers noted that the rabbis encouraged the women to sing and play their tambourines, to keep up the spirits of the exiles. And so it came to pass that Sephardic women sang and played and never stopped. They sang the old songs and made new ones to teach to their children and grandchildren, continuing this practice down to the present day. Courtship, marriage, lullabies, laments, and stories from the Bible—every aspect of life is reflected in this lively and loving repertoire, and most songs speak clearly in a woman’s voice. To be sure, men also made and sang songs, but they most often told of women they’d loved, lost, hoped for, dreamed of, and desired. 

Trio Sefardi has mined this rich tradition, sung in Ladino or Judeo-Espagnol, and in this program they weave together songs and stories from the former Yugoslavian, Greek, Turkish, North African, and Middle Eastern sources to show the pervasive influence of women in Sephardic song. Their primary resource has been their longtime mentor, Flory Jagoda (1923 – 2021), who learned many songs from her Nona (grandmother), Berta Altarac, as a child in the Bosnian village of Vlasenica, and who wrote many more while in her 60s and 70s in her adopted home in Virginia.

The trio’s lead vocalist, Susan Gaeta, was Nona Flory’s apprentice in the Virginia Humanities Master/Apprentice program and is now herself a master artist with her own apprentice. Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette praised a performance of the trio at the Kennedy Center as “lovely and luminous,” and called Susan’s voice “compelling.” In the words of Jewish music scholar/performer/teacher Joshua Horowitz, “the connection of Trio Sefardi with the legendary Flory Jagoda is so palpable that the group can be seen as the heir apparent to her legacy.”

Indeed, as Flory herself wrote, “Trio Sefardi’s beautiful harmonies and skilled accompaniment movingly translates the joy and soul of the lost world I remember so well. Along with my own family, I am proud to call them my musical heirs.”