New Children Songs in An Old Language

by Musarat Khawaja SEO Exectuive

Sarah Aroeste has recently released a new album which is really a kind of music which impresses parents of young children and toddlers love. They actually look for some eye catchy melodies, easy to sing songs, with simple monotonous lyrics that should be inspired by the children of today all across the world and also with the dollops of comedy and surprises.

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This album is considered unique and different from the others for containing all songs in Ladino. It was the place where the medieval Judeo-Spanish dialect Sephardic Jews have been taken with them when they were barred from Portugal and Spain before more than 500 years and whose generation is disappearing till this day.

The 40 years old Aroeste who lives in Berkshires said in an interview taken through a phone call that her new children’s album ‘Ora de Despertar’ (Time to Wake Up) is the production of her own personal experiences as being a mother. “Of course, there are some wonderful Ladino lullabies that are beloved — very fun, sprightly songs that, certainly, kids could enjoy, but they weren’t written for kids. … I was a soon-to-be mother who wanted to play music for my kids in the same vein as all the other CDs I was receiving in English or Hebrew. I wanted the equivalent in Ladino and I couldn’t find anything, so I decided to write it myself,” she said.

Many of her songs in this album are from toddler point of views. As the song has sung to wake up a kid in the morning and the song is to greet the children via eyes, hands, ears, and all the body languages. This song encourages children to count from 1 to 10 by using barnyard animals. There is another imagination song that makes kids to think about to be like a star, sun, the moon or the clouds. All the songs in this album are very contemplative that are not composed with the point of a child but the parents.

Aroeste further stated, “Some of these songs were written while [I was] pregnant with my first child. One of the lullabies in particular, ‘Komo Vas a Ser?’ (How Will You Be?). I was imagining what my child would be like. That was one of the first songs I wrote.”

She has shared her experiences as being a mother of her own kids. When she was eight months pregnant, she was too pregnant to travel from place to another. So, she told about it as “I was eight months pregnant with Dalia, so I was too pregnant to travel. My producer recorded the instrumental part of the album separately in New York, and then brought the mixes to my living room in the Berkshires, and he just plopped the microphone in the middle of my living room with toys everywhere. And I recorded it in about two days with my daughter running around. And that really lent itself to some of the spirit on the album, that it was recorded in the place where it was inspired.”

Actually she wants to interpret that the rhythm of one song was directly influenced by Irit. She further added, “My daughter was walking outdoors for the first time. It was last spring, and she’d never walked barefoot on grass before. So that was the first opportunity for her to walk outside and she was in awe of all that nature she saw in front of her. [‘Si Yo Era el Sielo’ (If I Were the Sky)] was inspired by that experience, just watching her outside as she learned to walk, toddling from leaf to tree to flower, so that song captured the rhythm of her feet.”

She finally concluded by pointing out that ‘Nochada Buena’ (Good Night) is the song composed on the bookends a complete day with the title song and which is the last song on this album. She said, “I wrote that song when I realized that my daughter thought there were too many fun things to do while you’re awake, so she never wanted to go to sleep.”