Hi Judith,
I've uploaded a few samples. The books I have were printed outside USA so the page sizes don't fit on a flat-bed scanner. I've taken pictures to give you an idea of what it looks like. Yes, there is musical notation - not just lyrics.
I'll keep posting the musical pieces as I crop and splice photos together.
To give some background on the Sephardi Music of Amsterdam and how it is different from Sephardi music of Arab lands please read the following; the following is what I was taught.
The Septuagint translated the Hebrew word 'machol' into the Koine Greek word chorós (Chorus). As a result, the early christian Church borrowed this word from antiquity as a designation for the music orchestration, worship, and singing congregation both in heaven and on earth. To the Christians, this sort of festival was a bridge from 1) pagan bacchanalian forms of worship to a means of worshiping a multitude of Roman and Greek Gods, to 2) a trinitarian piety.
The Instruments of 3rd Century CE Macedonia, are those very same instruments (Lyre & drum) used in early Byzantine hymns - more like "death dirges" than music actually. Those hymns were then married with Gregorian Chants which in turn adopt the music arrangements of French Troubadors. These later evolve into Madrigal, Tocata and Quartet...eventually symphonic arrangement.
In a distinctly separate and isolated venue - Arabs and Jews were doing their own thing...together. In my opinion, these early hymns of Sephardim borrows from the mnemonic memorization techniques taught in Beit Midrashot for Miqra and Mishneh. Varying meters, syncopation and varying tonality gave rise to poetry, Jahili poets, in those same meters. Curiously, women were entrusted to bring life to the poetry via improvisational maqam...seems the guys didn't provide an nice aesthetic This persisted until the first crusade.
Before the first crusade, Arabs and Hebrews in al-Andalus (Cordoba, Granada, Segovia) had become the primary manufacturing source for musical instruments whose sounds reflected the tonality of piyyutim and Miqra. English words such as "lute", "rebec", and "naker" are derived from Arabic "oud", "rabab", and "nakhara".
The French Troubadors copied judeo-arabic forms, and instrument assembly techniques, and modified them to their own use. This spread throughout Europe and became part of the Madrigal arrangements of the medieval period.
To call early byzantine christian forms of noise "music" overstates the truth. The christians did not innovate - they copied. The root of ordered musical composition belongs the Jews and Arabs in al_Andalus whose works influences our airwaves to this day. Without the Jews of Italy having mastered the science of harmonics those madrigals would not have evolved into Symphonies.
Being Jews in a foreign land, the Jews of Amsterdam adopted many of the instruments and choral arrangements whose roots are found in Gregorian chants and later Baroque period chorale arrangements. You will not that some of hte Amsterdam pieces call for Organs...wholly unknown in arab lands.
