Sephardic and New Mexican Folk Music Meet for a Hanukkah Concert
A unique Hanukkah concert is set to bring together two rich folk traditions at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The performance weaves together Sephardic melodies carried across the Mediterranean by Jews expelled from medieval Spain with the distinctive folk songs of New Mexico, a region shaped by centuries of Spanish colonial settlement. For listeners, the evening offers a rare moment of cross-cultural resonance, with music that speaks to shared histories of diaspora, faith, and cultural resilience.
While the concert takes place thousands of kilometres from Australian shores, the themes it explores will feel familiar to Jewish communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Australia's Jewish population, the largest in the country and centred in suburbs such as St Kilda, Elsternwick, Bondi, and Rose Bay, has long engaged with Sephardic heritage through Ladino-language programs, synagogue choirs, and community festivals. A performance that joins Iberian-Jewish music with New World folk traditions lands in a country that has built its own multicultural tapestry across generations.
Hanukkah itself arrives in Australia during the warm stretch of December, when Sydneysiders and Melburnians traditionally light candles by open windows and back patios rather than beside frosty hearths. This seasonal inversion has shaped how Australian Jewish families mark the festival, often pairing latkes and sufganiyot with summer salads and trips to the local pool. A concert celebrating the holiday therefore resonates differently in the southern hemisphere, where the Festival of Lights glows against long, balmy evenings.
The Lensic, a restored 1931 art deco theatre in downtown Santa Fe, has become a beloved venue for concerts that bridge cultures. Its intimate acoustics and storied stage have hosted everything from klezmer ensembles to flamenco troupes, making it a natural home for a program that seeks to honour the Sephardic diaspora while honouring the New Mexican folk traditions that grew out of a related Spanish heritage.
The Lensic Performing Arts Center
The Lensic Performing Arts Center sits at the corner of San Francisco Street and West Alameda in the heart of Santa Fe. Built in 1931 as a vaudeville house, the venue was meticulously restored in the early 2000s and now serves as a hub for performances that draw on the region's artistic abundance. Its Moorish-influenced architecture, with horseshoe arches and decorative motifs reminiscent of the Alhambra, lends itself gracefully to a concert that draws on Iberian and New Mexican heritage.
Audiences attending the Hanukkah concert can expect an evening shaped by the venue's signature intimacy. Seating for around 800 patrons means that every corner of the room carries sound, a quality that benefits music with delicate instrumentation. Local Santa Fe families often walk to performances along the city's adobe-lined streets, gathering afterward at nearby restaurants to discuss the show, a tradition that mirrors the way Sydneysiders might head to a Newtown wine bar after a gig at the Enmore Theatre.
For New Mexicans, the Lensic represents more than a venue. It is a civic landmark where Pueblo, Hispanic, Anglo, and Jewish traditions regularly intersect. The Hanukkah concert fits within that legacy, offering a performance that speaks to the state's centuries-old patterns of cultural exchange and adaptation.
Sephardic Musical Traditions
Sephardic music traces its roots to the Jewish communities of medieval Iberia, flourishing particularly in Spain until the expulsions of 1492. Forced into exile across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, Sephardic Jews carried with them a repertoire of songs in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language. Over centuries, these melodies absorbed influences from Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Balkan musical traditions, producing a sound that is at once recognisably Jewish and deeply cosmopolitan.
Instruments commonly associated with Sephardic music include the oud, the qanun, the darbuka, and the violin, with vocals often carrying texts drawn from religious liturgy, romance ballads, and lullabies. Songs like "Adio Querida" and "La Komida" have circulated for generations at family gatherings, weddings, and holiday meals, preserving a sense of cultural continuity across vast distances. Many Australian Sephardic families, particularly those with origins in Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, still sing these songs at gatherings in Melbourne's inner suburbs.
The tradition is living rather than purely historical. Contemporary Sephardic musicians continue to compose new songs, fuse the old repertoire with jazz and classical music, and pass the music down to younger generations through community centres, synagogues, and informal choirs. A Hanukkah concert offers an occasion to showcase this ongoing vitality rather than treating the music as a museum artefact.
New Mexican Folk Music
New Mexican folk music emerged from the confluence of Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican influences in what is now the southwestern United States. Songs and dance traditions such as the alabado, the corrido, and the matachine have been preserved across centuries in villages along the Rio Grande and throughout the northern mountains. Instruments like the guitar, the vihuela, the accordion, and sometimes the fiddle provide the backbone of the music, while call-and-response vocals give it a communal, accessible character.
Like Sephardic repertoire, New Mexican folk music often carries religious themes alongside stories of love, hardship, and celebration. The alabado, for instance, blends Catholic devotional language with local vernacular, sung at community events and family gatherings for generations. The Hanukkah concert programme is likely to draw on this spiritual dimension, pairing songs that speak to faith and continuity across cultural lines.
For many New Mexicans, folk music is a living link to ancestors who arrived in the region centuries ago. The repertoire is taught in schools, performed at community fiestas, and shared at family gatherings. Its inclusion in a Hanukkah programme honours the depth of the local tradition while inviting collaboration across unexpected lines.
A Shared Iberian Inheritance
The cultural threads connecting Sephardic music and New Mexican folk traditions are stronger than they might first appear. Both trace significant elements back to the Iberian Peninsula, where Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities coexisted for centuries before the events of 1492 reshaped the region. Spanish settlers who arrived in what is now New Mexico brought with them linguistic and musical patterns that still echo in the state's folk traditions, even as Jewish communities were excluded from the colonial enterprise.
| Element | Sephardic Music | New Mexican Folk Music |
|---|---|---|
| Geographic origin | Medieval Iberia, Mediterranean diaspora | Rio Grande valley, northern New Mexico |
| Language of lyrics | Ladino, Hebrew, Turkish | Spanish, regional vernacular |
| Signature instruments | Oud, qanun, violin, darbuka | Guitar, vihuela, accordion, fiddle |
| Common themes | Diaspora, romance, religious devotion | Faith, land, family, community |
| Religious connection | Liturgical and folk devotional songs | Alabado, matachine, devotional verse |
| Cultural function | Weddings, holidays, life-cycle events | Fiestas, family gatherings, village rituals |
Scholars of both traditions have long noted shared melodic contours, similar modal structures, and overlapping poetic forms. The romance ballad, in particular, appears in both Sephardic and New Mexican repertoires, sometimes with strikingly similar texts. A concert that places these traditions side by side is less a novelty than a homecoming, revealing the ways in which history connects communities across oceans.
The collaboration also speaks to broader questions about identity, diaspora, and belonging. For Sephardic Jews, the music is a reminder of a homeland left behind. For New Mexican Hispanos, it represents a homeland continually reinvented across generations. Bringing the two together offers a powerful statement about the resilience of culture in the face of displacement and change.
Hanukkah Themes in the Music
Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days. In music, the festival has inspired everything from traditional Hebrew blessings to contemporary rock songs, with each generation finding new ways to express the holiday's themes of perseverance, light, and renewal. A concert that combines Sephardic and New Mexican folk traditions offers an unusual opportunity to explore these themes through unexpected musical lenses.
Programmes may include both traditional Hanukkah blessings, sung in Ladino, alongside New Mexican songs that echo similar themes of hope and survival. Candle-lighting ceremonies often feature in such events, with audiences invited to participate in the rituals of the holiday. For many attendees, the evening becomes a moment of communal reflection as much as a concert, blending art and observance in a way that feels organic rather than imposed.
In Australia, where Jewish communities have developed their own distinctive Hanukkah customs, the music resonates with families who gather around menorot in the warmth of summer evenings. The themes of light over darkness take on a slightly different character when the sun sets late and the air carries the scent of jasmine rather than snow. The Santa Fe concert, even from afar, offers Australian Jews a reminder that the festival's meanings travel well.
Australian Connections and Listening Opportunities
While the concert takes place in Santa Fe, Australian audiences have their own ways of engaging with the music. Melbourne's Sephardic community, particularly centred around congregations in St Kilda and Elsternwick, regularly hosts Ladino-music evenings and Ladino-language classes. Sydney's Jewish cultural organisations, including those in the eastern suburbs, often programme Sephardic and Ladino workshops alongside Israeli and Yiddish events. Both cities offer venues like the Melbourne Recital Centre and the Sydney Opera House that could comfortably host similar cross-cultural programmes.
Australians interested in following news of the Santa Fe concert, or learning more about the broader cultural work of the publication covering it, can read further at the Federation site. For those unable to attend in person, livestreams and recorded performances have become increasingly common in the post-pandemic era, allowing audiences in distant cities to participate in events they might once have missed entirely.
The concert also offers Australian Jewish communities an occasion to reflect on their own musical heritage and consider future collaborations. Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Israeli traditions have long coexisted in Australian Jewish life, but programmes that explore Iberian and New World connections remain relatively rare. The Santa Fe performance could serve as inspiration for similar events in Melbourne, Sydney, or Brisbane, where audiences are always keen for music that surprises as well as comforts.
Looking Forward
Music that bridges traditions often opens doors to further conversation. The Hanukkah concert at the Lensic represents an opportunity not only for a memorable evening but also for ongoing dialogue between communities that share more history than they might have realised. Future collaborations could include exchange programmes between Sephardic musicians in Melbourne and folk artists in Santa Fe, recordings that pair Ladino songs with New Mexican instrumentation, or educational workshops that introduce young people to both traditions.
For Australian audiences, the concert offers a prompt to seek out the Sephardic and New Mexican music already circulating in their own cities. Local Jewish community centres, synagogues, and cultural organisations can point listeners towards recordings, performances, and language classes that keep these traditions alive. Listening groups, university programmes, and folk-music societies across the country have begun to take an interest in Iberian and Southwestern repertoire, suggesting that the audience for such cross-cultural work is real and growing.
A practical next step for Australian listeners is to mark the first night of Hanukkah by organising a small gathering at home, streaming the Santa Fe concert live where possible, and following it with a shared meal of latkes alongside a Ladino song learnt in advance from an online tutorial. That single evening can become the seed of an ongoing tradition, one that links a synagogue courtyard in St Kilda or a Sydney living room to a stage in Santa Fe, and keeps the conversation between these two folk traditions alive well beyond the eight nights of the festival.