Sonic Heritage Diversity
"Sonic Heritage Diversity" is a SSHRC-funded project generating a multi-disciplinary archive and data base - and creative activation - of the disappearing musics, musical and listening practices and related intangible cultural heritage of contemporary Montreal Jews of Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) and North African (Sephardic) origin.
Over the past 65 years, Jews from the Middle East and North Africa have migrated to Montreal. With them came diverse musical and linguistic traditions and oral histories, both in French, Hebrew, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and Judeo-Arabic. The music and listening practices of these communities are characterized by rich musical innovation and inter-cultural complexity, owing to the broad scope of musical idiom and subject matters that they encompass, and intersect with broader cultural practices such as negotiations of gender, social mobility, communal identity, magic and folklore. Musical practices include not only monophonic or communal singing in the synagogue or prayer group, but also rich instrumental accompaniment and nuanced non-sonic performance practices.
The project is both a Public Humanities project and a research creation project. As the former, it proactively engages the Montreal Jewish community, especially Jews of Mizrahi and Sephardic origin, in intangible heritage production as independent agents of cultural production and heritage preservation. The goal is the creation of a sustainable, ongoing Jewish minority cultural heritage that consists of rich, community-led depictions of Jewish people, their music, and their diverse journeys. The project has the potential for impact beyond the Jewish community, since it will be a methodological model to other Canadian minority communities for the independent creation and maintenance of their own heritage initiatives. On the research side, the project will create a rich database and archive that can be used by interdisciplinary scholars in their critical studies of Jewish musicking and ethnicity. More broadly, the project will be a model for innovative, community based data collection and research methods that can be utilized to discover and preserve disappearing repertoires of intangible heritage.
