ABSTRACT
The story of the Judeo-Spanish song entitled Las horas de la vida opens our inquiry into the vast cosmos of post-traditional Sephardic folksongs. Written over more than two decades and being the earliest one exposed to public scrutiny, the story of Las horas de la vida is still and will probably forever remain an open-ended one. The narrative of this chapter follows my own path of uncovering the multiple manifestations of the complex of texts, melodies and utterances of each or both comprising the “song” (see Chapter 1). The different stages in the course of disentangling the instances of the song appear in more or less chronological sequence in order to show how the research process itself can be as unpredictable as its object.
