For our next meeting,  we are delighted to welcome Simone Salmon, a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at UCLA who is currently completing her dissertation. 

Salmon will discuss a draft chapter from her dissertation, entitled “‘So Everyone Will Sing Them for Eternity’: Songs as Vessels of Memory and the Musical Construction of Sefaradi Belonging.” Drawing on the archive assembled by her great-grandmother, Emily Sene, the chapter examines Ladino songs as portable and continually reconstructed archives of memory. Following the movement of Emily and Isaac Sene from the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey through Cuba and New York to Southern California, Simone explores how songs were collected, recomposed, circulated, and reinterpreted across changing diasporic settings. The chapter argues that musical fragmentation and variation should not be understood simply as cultural loss, but as generative processes through which memory, historical attachment, and Sefaradi belonging are repeatedly remade.

Salmon’s broader research lies at the intersection of Jewish music, diaspora, and state power. Her work focuses on Jewish musical life in Turkey and its diasporas within wider Sefaradi and Mizrahi musical worlds, with particular attention to authoritarian governance, minority silencing, and cultural resistance. She is also a musician, directs a Ladino choir, and produces and hosts the radio programme Los Bilbilikos.