Re: klezmer and Sephardic

[Carol Freeman <tsipra...>]

Joshua Horowitz wrote:

> Now that you mention it, Hankus:
> Koutev is not the only arranger of the Voix Bulgares stuff. Prof. Dr.
> Nikolai Kaufman, president of the Bulgarian Composers' Union,
> has supposedly collected about 30.000 folk tunes for the Bulgarian
> Academy of Sciences during his field work. He's Ashkenazi and has
> arranged of thousands of tunes including Yiddish + Ladino tunes, amung
> them the choir Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares etc. etc. He lives in Sofia,
> speaks English, Yiddish, Ladino, Russian, Hebrew.

Kaufman, (who may have very well collected 30,000 songs, since I have about 
eight
or nine or his publications sitting on my bookshelf, each one with close to 
2,000
songs in it - not indexed by title - yikes!) did arrange a medley of Sephardic
songs for the Bulgarian Radio and Television Choir (Le Myst`ere des Voix
Bulgares) several years ago, and my friends in this ensemble proudly tell me 
that
they sing Evrejski Pesni (Jewish Songs.) The songs, performed in these highly
stylized choral arrangements, sound ridiculous, but then, in my opinion,
Bulgarian folk songs sound ridiculous sung this way as well.

>
> Just a note
> about the vocal style, too: at least one early music group has started
> including Sephardic songs sung in Bulgarian village women's style. In my
> fieldwork experience, Sephardic women didn't use that style. Not only
> that, many of the ones I interviewed dissociated themselves from it as
> being "village" "peasant" style. The few Bulgarian songs I've heard them
> sing were more in the line of popular urban songs of the time they were
> growing up. Cheers, Judith

Don't know what group Judith is referring to, so I don't know exactly which
Bulgarian women's style she means. (There's a really broad range of vocal styles
in Bulgaria.) I too have found that many Eastern European Jewish singers
(Ashkenzic and Sephardic) look upon "peasant music" with disdain. However, with
regard to Judith's point that the Balkan Sephardic songs were often performed in
a style that was close to that of the urban songs of the time, I'd just like to
point out to those unfamiliar with this music that in most urban centers of the
Balkans one heard more influence from the East (Ottoman) than from the West. So
the vocal placement (how the sound was actually produced) for Balkan Sepahardic
songs was often the same as for village music (using a speaking or throat
-centered voice), just lighter and differently colored. When women did sing in a
falsetto voice, it was a focussed falsetto, not the thin, airy sound that some
revival singers are using today. And while scales were not the same as those of
the country songs, they were the scales of the urban regional songs (and usually
not Western scales.) And just as in the local non-Jewish urban music, lush
ornamentation was generally an essential part of the song. So while singing
Sephardic repertoire in a style borrowed from Bulgarian village singing is
clearly not in keeping with tradition, the singing of these songs in a operatic
or airy voice with Westernized scales and without the proper ornamentation is
equally removed from the original, beautiful sound.

(Actually,the second half of that sentence holds true for Yiddish singing as
well, but let me not get started just now.....)

Carol




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