The Whole Music Experience

Ana Alcaide (Photo in Google Images) Where Swedish, Spanish and Jewish Cultures Meet  In 2012, I discovered Sephardic (Jewish) songs of Toledo via Ana Alcaide, a Spanish traditional musician.  After watching Alcaide's stunning YouTube videos in which she plays the Swedish keyed fiddle (nyckelharpa) and sings Ladino (Spanish Jewish culture) songs, I thought of interviewing the musician for this blog. I encourage anyone reading this to check out Ana Alcaide's videos on YouTube because you will learn a lot from this fascinating woman who bridges the scientific world with the musical one.  I caught up with Ana via e-mail and I'm honored to include her on this blog of musical healers. WME: How do your biology studies wed with your musical explorations? I ask this question because some musicians have taken music into the natural realm or have found musical aspiration from nature. Ana Alcaide: Right! In fact, nature is one of my great sources of insp...

World Ana Alcaide La Cantiga Del Fuego Arc Music I heard about the Spanish traditional musician Ana Alcaide last December.   Alcaide interests me because the musician/culture preserver/composer/performer went from playing her nyckelharpa (a traditional Swedish keyed-fiddle) on the streets of Toledo, to producing the album La Cantiga Del Fuego which landed on the top of the World Music Chart in Europe. Alcaide’s journey has lasted over a decade thus far, and which also includes higher education in music conservatories in Sweden and Spain, studies in biology, and a fascination with both musical traditions of the Sephardic Jews of Spain and North Africa, as well as, the nyckelharpa.   If you want to know how all of that fits together, then you must listen to La Cantiga Del Fuego , an album filled with stories about love, tragic loss, exile and hope, brimming with the sounds of exotic European and Middle Eastern instruments. Journalists have compared Alca...