Re: Sephardic, etc. (Microtones)

[Carol Freeman <tsipra...>]

Joshua Horowitz wrote:

> Carol,
>
> I'm interested in your comments about Yiddish singers, below. Were you
> saying also that most of the YIDDISH singers you learned from sang in
> microtonal scales?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying! Apparently, there are many historical
reasons for this that I am not adequately equipped to articulate, but one thing
that people don't often mention is the fact that makam systems are based on the
way people tend to naturally sing, and the scales make good vocal sense. I know
most revival singers have more or less evened out the pitch according to
Western expectations, but most of the immigrant singers I've worked with over
the past twenty-some odd years did not. (Of course, there is some regional
variation.)To my ear, these "cleaned up" versions of the songs are not only
sadly lacking in flavor and depth, but just plain sound "wrong."


Carol (and Judy),

> I totally agree with you about easy access to professionally recorded
> folk music taking its toll. There is another element to add to that.
> Modern western electric instruments are usually programmed or tuned to
> play in the tempered system, which
> has resulted in 2 tonal systems being played at the same time: the
> singer sings makam tuning and the instruments play tempered. Wedding
> bands all over the Balkans are like this, in spite of instruments which
> allow microtonal programming (a relatively new development). Still, many
> instruments, including guitars, e-basses and brass/wind  instruments are
> acoustically constructed on the tempered system. This duality has
> changed the purity of makamat at a genetic level among the younger
> generation of singers. The voices naturally adjust toward the
> instruments, so the singers sing in a kind of half-makam, half-tempered
> system. Can you comment about that? It's a fact which hits at the core
> of the theme of homogenization in the world music mill. Josh

Wow! - What a topic! So many facets to this. Many reasons for changes in
intonation in recent years apart from the use of guitars, etc. - for me a
really big one is the folk music conservatory system in so many of the Soviet
controlled or influenced nations, as well as in Albania. I know Bulgaria best,
so I'll talk about that. Folk instrumentalists and singers were funneled
through special high schools and then universities, where they learned music
from all over Bulgaria.  No matter if a person was the tenth generation gajdar
(bagpipe player) or singer in his family, his past experience counted for
little and he was taught  to read music, play his gajda tunes or vocal melodies
on the PIANO, and then sing his song or play the pieces on his bagpipe from
sheet music. Melodies were molded to fit into Western concepts of pitch,
regional stylings dropped out, and in general the music became, as you say
Josh, homogenized. Conservatory graduates are often adamant about pitch - I had
such fights over certain notes of songs with some of these musicians - I would
play them a tape of a respected singer performing a tune with traditional
intonation, and they would refuse to even listen to what she was doing. Add to
this the system of paying radio folk music arrangers by the note - so that one
ends up with these elaborate, off-the-wall Western accompaniments to
traditional non-Western songs, and the prevalence of Russian and
Western-influenced polyphonic choirs (something that was artificially
introduced into the country in the 1950's), and microtonal performance of
traditional melodies had a real uphill battle to fight. The problem began way
before the introduction of the modern wedding band sound.  Even though many of
the instruments used to accompany the traditional music were able to match the
microtones of the vocal melody, the aesthetic had changed.

One of the things that does impress me is how so many of the professional
Bulgarian singers who are now in their fifties and sixties were able to sing
with exact Western intonation when performing their complicated choral
repertoire (four or even five part harmonies, which for those who don't know,
is not found in traditional Bulgarian music) or when singing solo with one of
those above-mentioned awful accompaniments, yet the second they were allowed to
sing unaccompanied or accompanied by a sensitive musician on a non-tempered
instrument, their melodies were perfectly performed with the older, more
"authentic" style of intonation. This is not true of the younger singers (who
went through the conservatory system.) Of course, I've also heard singers who
were not at all able to adjust their pitch to tempered accompaniment, and the
result was awful.

As for singers having to perform non-tempered melodies with tempered
instruments - well, that's a real can of worms, and I'd like to address this
later - perhaps privately.

I always assumed that in Yiddish and Sephardic music, microtones, as well as
folk vocal style and ornamentation, fell by the wayside partly because of the
persistent desire to legitimize or "improve" - and therefore Westernize - the
"simple music" of the common people. (I am always amazed when I see a revival
singer who has actually bothered to meet with an older immigrant singer of
Yiddish or Ladino music, then go and turn the very same song they have just
learned into opera. Are they thinking that they know more than these master
singers whose music has evolved within a tradition over time?)

And then there's urban Greece. The gorgeous Asia Minor repertoire of the
thirties in which the dhromi, or makams, were the foundation of the music, have
been recorded over the past fifteen or twenty years by Greek popular singers
with (Turkish) non-tempered instruments accompanying them, yet even though
these singers chose to record with instruments that are designed to play makam,
the singers repeatedly performed the songs in tempered pitch. Was it all the
years of bouzouki that so altered the intonational and ornamental aesthetic?
Go figure!

Lots more to say on this, but prefer to wait till another time.



>
>
> > Judith says she is finding fewer singers who still sing in makam. I have
> > had the same disappointing experience working with Yiddish singers just in
> > the past few years (previously, most of the singers I learned from sang in
> > specific microtonal scales.) Easy access to profesionally recorded folk
> > music has clearly taken its toll... Carol
>



---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+