Judith R. Cohen

Judith Rita Cohen (born December 9, 1949) is a Canadian ethnomusicologist, music educator, and performer. Her research interests include Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) songs; medieval and traditional music from the Balkans, Portugal, French Canada, and Yiddish; pan-European balladry; and songs from Crypto-Jewish regions in Portugal. She has received numerous research and travel grants to do fieldwork in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Israel, Turkey, Greece, France, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, and has published many journal articles, papers, and book chapters. She plays a variety of medieval musical instruments, and sings and performs as part of her lectures and in concerts and solo recitals. She is also the editor of the Alan Lomax Spanish collection maintained by the Association for Cultural Equity.

Early life and education Judith Rita Cohen was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her parents are Canadian-born. Cohen is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent; her family traces its lineage to Lithuania and Latvia. she directed the folk song club in her high school, and learned French-Canadian and Yiddish folk songs as well.

Cohen earned her B.A. in English Literature at McGill University in 1971. At age 20 she visited Yugoslavia with a friend and became interested in Balkan music; after graduation, she decided to spend a year abroad, hitchhiking through Spain, Morocco, the Balkans, and Turkey, where her interest in traditional Sephardic folk music was kindled. For her fieldwork she interacted with Sephardic Jews who had emigrated to Canada from Morocco and former Ottoman countries.

Career Scholarship

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salign=right There is a Spanish singer who claimed to be singing "an eleventh century Sephardic lullaby". Well, first of all, no one was writing down lullaby melodies – or almost any melodies except early church plainchant – in the eleventh century. And there was no such language as 'Spanish' then – much less Judeo-Spanish. The Judeo-Spanish of the songs people hear is a diaspora language. — Judith R. Cohen She is now the editor of the Lomax Spanish collection maintained by the Association for Cultural Equity. She has written detailed liner notes for CD collections of Lomax's dance tunes and ballads from many regions of Spain under the Franco regime.

Cohen has presented papers at many international conferences. Cohen taught medieval music at The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto from 1983 to 1988, and worked as an itinerant music instructor in recorder for the Toronto Board of Education from 1986 to 1990. Cohen's solo performances have been broadcast on CBC Radio and on Radio Communautaire Juive in Paris. Her repertoire includes medieval music and traditional songs from Spanish, Portuguese, Sephardic, Balkan, Yiddish, and French-Canadian music traditions.

From 1976 to 1984, Cohen was the director of the Sanz Cuer Ensemble, a medieval performance group in Montreal.

Memberships and affiliations Cohen is a board member and past president of the Canadian Society for Traditional Music. She holds memberships in the Folklore and Ethnography Studies Association of Canada, American Folklore Society, Iberian Ethnomusicology Society, International Council for Traditional Music, Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, European Association for Jewish Studies, International Society for Sephardic Studies, the Canadian branch of the American Federation of Musicians, and the Ontario Folk Dance Association. Tamar Ilana began accompanying her mother on fieldwork research trips to Spain and other locales from the age of 4; she has since become a professional flamenco dancer, singer, and music educator, and often performs with her mother in concerts and recordings.

Cohen is fluent in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Canciones de Sefarad: Empezar quiero contar (Songs of Sepharad: "I'll begin the story..."), 2000 Dans mon chemin j'ai rencontré (On My Way I Met), 1997 Con Viela y Mochila, Madrid (With Fiddle and Backpack, Madrid), 1991 Primavera en Salonica: Canciones de los Sefardíes y sus Vecinos (Spring in Salonica: Songs of the Sephardim and Their Neighbors), 1992 1492-1992 Revisited: The Sephardic Song "Revival", 1992

Selected bibliography Articles

(English translation)

Papers

Book chapters