Re: Sephardic, etc. (Microtones)

[Owen Davidson <owend...>]

As a possibly irrelevent side note:  I asked a Turkish instrument builder how 
the
microtonal fretting for the saz and tanbur were calculated, and he explained 
that
they were not calculated, but derived from perfect intervals.  Specifically,
starting with the open string, the perfect fourth and fifth intervals were 
located,
and frets tied at these locations.  Then the fourth and fifth were taken from 
each
of these notes, to a total of eleven fourths and eleven fifths.  The result is a
microtonal scale (speaking in instrument-makers' rather than musicians' terms) 
that
is specific to the length, gauge, and pitch of the string.  Needless to say,
strings with different characteristics, tuned to different notes, would not
necessarily give the same placement, which is why the tunings used for these
instruments tend to involve only two or three related pitches.  When you try to
produce an instrument that can accomodate Western-style harmony and key 
modulation,
the even-tempered scale becomes necessary, but this is an artificial,
mathematically-derived compromise designed to sound equally bad in any "key."
Small wonder, then, that the makam "makes good vocal sense":  it comes directly
from what most pleases the ear.

As for the poor bouzouki, please don't blame it for what has happened to Greek
popular music.  One hundred years ago, the bouzouki was virtually 
indistinguishable
from any other member of the saz family.  The metal frets came about when it
started hanging around with the guitar (kind of the way teenagers acquire nose 
and
lip ornaments).  As the trend toward ever more dramatic harmonic frameworks
unfolded, the instrument went uptown.  You can hear it starting to happen in 
Jack
Halkias' seminal "Minore tou Teke:"  the grand-daddy of today's self-indulgent
bouzouki solo.  He's playing in the old-style tuning, but his shocking 
modulations
leave the poor guitaist in the dust.  You can hear the guy fumbling for the 
chord,
and he never does get it.  Once Western harmony took hold, it was only a matter 
of
time before the singer-friendly modal tuning added a course and began to ape the
guitar.  Now the bouzouki, once friend and confidant to the downtrodden and the
weary, is a painted harlot, encrusted in cheap costume-jewelry, amplified, 
doused
in reverb, and, in the company of drum-kits and synthesizers, immolated on the
altar of the tourist dollar.  Psefti dounia, aman!

Owen

Carol Freeman wrote:

> 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
> >
>

--
Owen Davidson
Amherst  Mass
The Wholesale Klezmer Band

The Angel that presided o'er my birth
Said Little creature formd of Joy and Mirth
Go Love without the help of any King on Earth

Wm. Blake


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