Re: jewish music databases/Keynote

[Joel Bresler <jbresler...>]

Trying again. I just sent an incomplete message to the list. Apologies. To 
finish off, see below.

J

---

Hi, Lori and all. A detailed response to a worthy issue. Read as much as 
you like...

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the song title question in the 
context of cataloging the 6,000 or so Sephardic song performances in my 
collection. Here are some of my thoughts. First, what I think you would you 
like users to be able to do? Ideally, I think you would like them to be 
able to enter the title of _any_ version of a song, and the system then 
finds all the other variants for you. You might also wish to have songs 
that shared the same melody tied together in some fashion. Sounds simple, 
but it's not. The issue is overwhelmingly an editorial one, NOT a database 
or programming issue.

Folk song titles are inherently "messy". Here is a list of the variants in 
my database for one song, "La rosa enflorece":

La rosa
La Rosa
La Rosa En Floresa
La Rosa Enflorece
La rosa enflorece
La Rosa enflorece
La rosa enflorece (Hashoshana porakhat)
La rosa enflorece/Los bilbilicos
La rosa enfloresce
La Rosa Enflorese
La rosa enflorese (Los bilbilikos)
La Rosa Enfloresse
La rosa inflorece
La rosa infloréce
La rose enflorece
La roza enflorece
La roza enflorese
Los Bibilicos
Los bilbilicos
Los bilbilicos (La rosa enflorece)
Los bilbilicos cantan
Los Bilbilicos Cantan
Los bilbilikos
Los Bilbilikos
Los Bilbilikos Kantan

And believe me, there are songs that are a lot more complicated than 
this.Sometimes a song can have versions of two different texts 
("contamination", in the unhelpful jargon of ethnomusicologists.)  Some 
songs have been "named" much like the Child Ballads in English folk songs 
refer to the same song no matter what the variation in the text. I can 
supply details off list for anyone interested in some of the issues.

So, what you really need is a "key" that ties all umpteen versions of a 
song title back to a controlled title, and in reverse ties this controlled 
title to all umpteen versions of a song title. That way if a searcher has 
just one title or a key word from it, you can find every other. But as I 
say, this is not trivial. Ladino, for example, has no standard orthography 
in Romance characters. This a full-time multi-month effort just for 
Sephardic titles, which of course have to reckoned as a small subset of the 
Yiddish titles and much larger corpus of Jewish music. It's not going 
happen "organically" as more titles are added to a database; instead it 
will take a concerted effort, most likely under one person's editorial 
control (for Sephardic titles) or one supreme editor and a team's control 
(for Yiddish and other titles) to make any sort of progress.

Layla tov,

Joel

At 06:53 PM 1/25/01 -0500, you wrote:
>How about Keynote from our friend Geraldine Auerbach at the JMI?  I don't
>know if this is a feature of the software (I'll try and look later), but
>perhaps if it isn't, they could make it one.  If you entered a number of
>related keywords, such as alternate spellings, searching one would bring up
>the others.  Geraldine, can you tell us if this is part of Keynote?  I would
>also find this helpful in cataloguing.
>
>Lorele
>
>
>ro (at) panix(dot)com wrote:
>
> > Not about music but about keeping track of and finding it:
> >
> > I've started cataloging my Hasidic records in an Access (ptui ptui ptui)
> > database.  What I'd really like to do tho is also catalog the tunes
> > themselves.
> >
> > A problem is inconsistant transliteration.  For example, I probably
> > have a dozen different version of Lecha Dodi  or L'Cha Doidi or Lechah
> > Doideh.
> >
> > The best solution to my mind is to enter tune names in the character
> > set appropriate for the language; eg to enter Lecha Dodi in Hebrew.
> > Ignoring vowel points, all the above would spell identically.
> >
> > I see that the Freedman Collection at the U of P seems to be able
> > to do that.  My database experience in Sybase is vast, in Access
> > not so vast, but in either case having diffferent languages and
> > character sets for different fields is not something the DBMS
> > makes particularly simple.
> >
> > Has anyone in this list tried such a thing?  I tried contacting
> > the people who worked on the Freedman Collection but didn't hear
> > from them.
> >
> > roger
> >
> > --
> > r l reid        ro (at) panix(dot)com
> >
>



Joel Bresler
250 E. Emerson Rd.
Lexington, MA 02420 USA

Home Office:    781-862-4104
FAX:            781-862-0498
Email:          jbresler (at) ma(dot)ultranet(dot)com

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