Ya Lalla: Jewish Saharans Singing to Birth (https://yalalla.org.uk/) and Past and Present Musical Encounters Across the Strait of Gibraltar: Ya Lalla: A Sonic & Visual Spotlight on Women’s Resistance and Celebrations of Transmission(https://www.musicalencounters.co.uk/vanessa-exhibit). Website and online exhibit curated by Vanessa Paloma Elbaz.

Abstract

Jewish music studies is still a surprisingly recent disciplinary participant in digital humanities scholarship. Even as musicologist and metadata librarian Michelle Urberg observes that ethnomusicologists have regularly made use of a plethora of digital humanities tools since the 1980s (2018:134), Jewish historian Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky recognizes that Jewish studies have been slow to catch on to this trend (2020:19). Today, beyond a handful of institutional Jewish sound archives, book companion websites, and largely self-published podcasts, few scholars working at the intersections of these disciplines have recognized the potential of making research findings accessible to and engaging for the public.Vanessa Paloma Elbaz has recently completed not one but two interconnected multimedia projects, both with the subtitle "Ya Lalla." Together, they offer a fascinating visual and sonic narration of the history of the musical fertility rituals traditionally performed by North African Jewish women. As Elbaz explains, "the Yalalla platform explores the use of digital humanities to reinscribe the centrality of women's voices to Jewish life in North Africa, and to recreate sonic worlds which have been atomised with the dispersion of these communities in the last century." In the context of "highly patriarchal societies" contingent on "expanding filiation networks," pregnancy and birth served as "one of the few powerful tools women wielded." Though these important lifecycle events were initially accompanied by ancestral musical practices, they began to fall out of use during the French Protectorate era . Gradually, Jewish women moved to hospitals to give birth to their children, participated in processes of French cultural assimilation, and emigrated away from Marrakesh and Casablanca in Morocco, taking their cultural traditions with them. With her exclusive focus on Jewish women's musical encounters beyond the Ashkenazi mainstream, Elbaz's multimedia projects participate not only in the digitisation, but also the diversification, of diasporic Jewish musical experience.The first of these projects, "Ya Lalla: Jewish Saharans Singing to Birth," is devoted to a series of oral history interviews that Elbaz conducted with Mme Sultana Azeroual in Casablanca in 2015 and 2016. Azeroual, Elbaz explains on the sister website, is