measure for measure

[Judith R Cohen <judithc...>]

hi, I'll make some  more detailed comments about JOsh's excelllent
songbook later - just off-hand, I 've never seen any problem whatsoever
with dividing a measure between lines, especially if the musical and/or
text phrasing calls for it. Measures are a relatively new aspect in the
history of western music notation, they have no intrinsic value or
meaning except as a visual aid in marking off the units chosen as those
best describing as the movement of a piece of music - the layout should
serve the music and not vice versa.  Also, measures, and notation
altogether, have a somewhat different function in composed music from
that of oral tradition. If one is composing something new, to be read
and performed by others who are not likely to ever hear oneself singing
or playing it before they do, i.e. who are using this notation as their
only clue to what the music sounds like, then the bar lines and other
aspects of notation have definite functions, and must be carefully and
deliberately chosen.

In ethnomusicological transcriptions, one can (and often does) make a
major case for, unless there is a clearly delineated metrical pattern,
simply not using bar lines. Personally, that is my approach and that of
many colleagues, but others prefer to use barlines and indicate shifting
patterns by changing time signatures several times within a song. There
are positive and negative sides to both approaches.

(Most software music writing programmes appear to have been designed
especially to thwart this kind of flexibility (and most other kinds)
without elaborate circumvention inventions.)

But when it is a question of bending into the straitjacket of western
musical notation, a piece from an oral tradition often not meant for
notation, then it is a different story. A major part of part of
ethnomusicology has traditionally been to do just this - figure out how
best to pin an elusive piece of aural and oral tradition to a piece of
paper so that someone can then read it and reproduce it as closely as
possible to the original.Often the choice of time signature is somewhat
arbitrary - asymmetrical metres were not originally thought of as, say,
2+2+3; that's how people worked out how to write down what was being
done. Then a convention developed for calling it, say 7/8 for slower
tempi and 7/16 to indicate faster tempi, but it's just that - a useful
convention, to be used and bent as a tool. Until I learned to DANCE
these metres, it was very hard to play them or sing them properly years
ago, but once I had them in my feet and rest of my body, playing and
singing them was automatic.

This is generally impossible.The most unbelieveably precise
transcriptions of, say, complex polyrhythmic African drumming, have been
produced, or, perhaps closer to this lists' immediate concerns, Bartok's
exquisite transcriptions of eastern european and Turkish music. But
music is elusive, and one could not reproduce the sounds from even these
masterworks (no irony here, I mean it) of transcriptions unless they had
actually heard the sounds first and knew how to interpret them.Even
simple tunes, unless one knows the style , especially the vocal timbre,
will not sound the same. A piece of music (as most of you know) is MUCH
more than the pitches and time values of the notes . I shudder to
remember the various forms of musical castration I've heard in schools
where music teachers blithely pick up the latest curricular virtuous
multi-cultural songbook and accurately teach students the pitches and
time values of a Caribbean or African or Korean song, using a perfectly
innocuous transcription, and transform it into a bland, sugary piece of
nothing for the school concert... but I digress.

That's why I left medieval music as my main focus - got too frustrated
at knowing I'd never hear the sounds - the vocal timbre, the
inflections, the way of matching words to music - but especially HOW the
singers sang - all that stuff which notation can't capture.

So this is NOT a diatribe against notation, which I use constantly, and
is an essential tool. Just a longer response than I expected to make
about dividing measures! I know most of the songs in Josh's book, and in
some cases have actually collected them myself as well, from Salonica
Sephardim in Salonica itself or Israel or North America, and from my
cursory (so far) look, these are very fine transcriptions indeed of a
complex and beautiful repertoire.

 But yes, it would be ideal to have the CD in the sort of package which
it has become, fortunately, common to produce now that it's cheaper to
do so than it used to be, because again, no matter how good the
transcriptions are,

there's simply no way to know how a song is sung without hearing someone
sing it.

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