Hadas Bram
The santur sounds out of another time. Out of place, too, in a New Haven apartment.
The Persian instrument has been played for centuries. As first-year music doctoral student Hadas Bram GRD ’31 sits criss-cross on the floor, gently hitting its dozens of strings with small mallets, the twangy sound resonates through her living room. It sounds to my untrained ear almost like a beautiful cross between a guitar and a xylophone.
“Playing the santur feels like home for me. It’s a home I must continually work for, nurture and care for,” Bram later wrote to me over WhatsApp. “Playing the santur is both difficult and comforting. Difficult, because of its infinite and almost overwhelming possibilities; comforting, because even in the hardest moments, I find so much comfort in it.”
Bram’s academic work concentrates on connections between Jewish and Muslim sacred music. After an accident in her early adulthood, Bram became interested in exploring music through the sublime. Her released works, under the stage name Princess Laila, deepen these nuances and facilitate understanding between people of disparate backgrounds.
Bram is descended from Persian Jews, and she grew up in Jerusalem surrounded by Persian music, literature and poetry. She encountered a santur at age 16 and knew she wanted to play the instrument.
Her whole family pitched in and found someone who imported the instrument to Israel via Turkey — since Israel does not import anything from Iran directly. Bram said Persian Jews generally struggle to maintain their connection to Iran, because once they have immigrated to Israel, Iranian policies dictate that they cannot return.
“Being the hyphenated identity, being Israeli-Iranian, it’s always so weird,” Bram told me. “People just don’t think that between these two political entities that are fighting, there are people who are in the middle.”
And yet, Bram feels it is important that Jewish Persian culture continue to live.
When she was 20, after playing for a few years, Bram enrolled in a conservatory in Jerusalem, where she studied Arabic and Persian music. She went on to pursue Arabic and musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
It was there, in 2020, that Bram was hit by an ambulance and nearly died.
It took her ten months to be able to walk again. Even today, five years later, she has major health issues. The experience transformed her relationship with spirituality.
“There was something in that near-death experience that made me want to explore sublime things and transcendence,” Bram said.
Bram’s newfound sense of purpose has led her to look for meaning in Persian Jewish music and explore the connections between Jewish and Muslim music in the Middle East.
In Iran and other places, Jews historically often borrowed pieces of texts or melodies from Sufi communities and then sang them in a Jewish context. And, Bram told me, there are many knowledgeable Jewish scholars of Islamic mysticism, strengthening the ties between the two traditions.
Bram is working with Professor Edwin Seroussi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to compile a database of documents, photographs and recordings that illustrate the Jewish-Muslim relationship in sacred music. Seroussi, a former fellow of sacred music at the School of Music, hopes the database will be released online in late 2025.
“It’s a huge amount of material that we are processing photographs, for sure,” Seroussi said. “So we want to present a quite comprehensive audiovisual documentation of this shared space.”
Seroussi’s colleague, Nili Belkind, a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that researching and documenting Jewish Arab musicians and Arab musicians from other cultures is crucial.
Bram’s work with Sufi communities is unique within the project, Belkind added, because, especially in Israel, not much of Sufi tradition remains.
“There are very few Sufi lodges in Israel or Palestine,” Belkind told me, because few cultural groups are invested in the maintenance of Sufi gathering sites.
For Bram, this work is vital in understanding how Jewish and Muslim cultures coexist and grow together.
“We can learn a lot about their own existence from listening and engaging with the spiritual traditions of Jews in the Middle East and Iran and North Africa,” Bram said, “because there are so many points of commonality.”
Bram said that sometimes she’ll listen to a piece of music, and although it sounds like it could be Muslim, it is actually Jewish.
Like music, language provides Bram with a way to create connections across cultures. Hebrew was also something she almost took for granted, because she grew up speaking it. But when she learned Arabic, a whole world opened up to her.
“You can find new ways to express yourself and find new emotions that you weren’t able to express in your known environment,” Bram said. It is a phenomenon familiar to her from playing the santur.
Bram and I sat in her apartment, the santur between us, and she showed me the different strings and the soft mallets she uses. Sometimes, she feels like she is still learning how to play it.
The santur is both percussive and melodic — by hitting the strings with mallets, the musician creates a rhythm, but by varying where they hit it, they can change the pitch. It’s easy to make a beautiful sound using the santur, Bram told me. Some people say that even a cat walking across the strings could make music. But the skill lies in the technique of playing each distinct note, the ornamentation of the melody and even the tuning.
It took Bram three years to fully learn how to tune the santur. Though she played for me on a smaller version, she has used a santur with 96 strings, each of which has to be tuned.
“It’s a very educated instrument, because you really have to know how to tune it, and you have to think about it, and it’s always a bit like a puzzle,” Bram told me. “How am I going to tune it? How am I going to play this piece? It’s challenging, and I like this challenge.”
The nuance, the multiple dimensions to playing a santur — it all reminded me of how Bram spoke about her music and her academic work. Breaking the barriers between percussion and melody created a thoughtful fusion of sound.
I wondered how this syncretism impacted Bram’s outlook on life. What did it mean for her to read and absorb Sufi mysticism, to live in Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi and to play the infinitely intricate santur?
On the one hand, she said, it makes her more empathetic.
“I speak Arabic, I speak Farsi, I speak Hebrew, and this makes me very sensitive to human suffering around me, because I can see it in its own language,” Bram she told me.
Bram finds a sacred “human-to-human” connection through the music she releases under her stage identity, Princess Laila. Invented during the time after her accident, while Bram was recovering at home, Laila embodies the fluidity that Bram harnesses in her academic work and her identity.
Laila lives in a “sort of third dimension,” Bram explained, where there are no borders in the Middle East, where someone could travel all the way from Israel to Iran. Laila speaks Hebrew and Arabic, and represents the syncretic, evolving identity that Bram herself feels when she speaks different languages.
Using the santur alongside hip-hop beats and rap, Laila also blends the musical styles that Bram described as exciting and “empowering.”
To date, Bram has released two albums as Princess Laila. Her second one is mainly about Jerusalem.
“It really talks about the very material feeling of the city, and all of its tensions and conflicts, with this sublime feeling at the same time. This album tries to bring together my feeling of Jerusalem as a city of hope,” Bram told me. “And on the other hand, a city of things that I feel like are very far from transcendent and sublime.”
The album ends with a prayer, inspired by the Persian Jewish tradition of interweaving pieces of Sufi poetry with Jewish texts. Bram connected a Poem No. 466 by the 13th century mystical poet, Saadi of Shiraz, with part of Psalm 55 and layered it with electronic sounds. Then, she added the santur.
How long, O soul, shall I not see a trace of the union with you?
For my heart no longer has the strength to witness separation;
If, at the path to your dwelling, your nature shall be thus —
I have set my heart to witness countless cruelties (Saadi, No. 466)
And I said: Oh that I had wings like a dove! then would I fly away, and be at rest.
Lo, then would I wander far off, I would lodge in the wilderness…We took sweet counsel together, in the house of God we walked with the throng. (Psalm 55)