measure for measure for measure for....

[Judith R Cohen <judithc...>]

hi, with a bit of time to look at Josh's long messages from yesterday:

> The music which I transcribed for the Sephardic Songbook is entirely vocal. > 
> That means that its rhythms are subordinate to the text. But this doesn't > 
> mean that they lack regularity which can be translated into a notation using 
> measures.
> 

Maybe I was unclear (almost certainly I was unclear), but I was not
suggesting that vocal music never be transcribed without measure,s
rather that sometimes measures work really well and at other times they
don't, and in the latter circumstances, I often find it preferable to
not use measures rather than try to force a melody into a measured
system. Again, at other times, it's utterly natural to use measures. But
bistorically, they are, as I said, a relatively modern (as a
medievalist, my use of the word "modern" usually means anything from ,
say, the early Baroque period on) aspect of western notation in any
case. Gee, in some ways, plainchant ("Gregorian" chant, a misnomer)
notation, which DOES offer possibilities of indicating performance
nuances (which later western notation abandoned in favour of a logical
metrical system which facilitated the production of efficient scores of
polyphonic music) might even be useful!

> ...the problem which occasionally arises in the Sephardic songs is that even 
> an isometric meter can be broken when the text in a verse demands this or the 
> performer decides to get fancy and stretch out a note or two.

This IS a problem, but for me even more problematic is figuring out when
the performer is "getting fancy", i.e. deliberately, or when s/he is
being forgetful or running out of breath etc, as is often the case with 
older people whose memory, teeth, hearing and respiratory capacity are
not what they were, or simply people who were never considered or
considered themselves particularly good singers until someone (usually
an ethnomusicologist or Hispanist) asked them to record the songs for
archival/analytic posterity.
> 
> Vocal folk music in many traditions relies on poetic meter for its 
> construction. So the texts will have a certain number of poetic "feet." 
..... > A poet, however, when reading this, may stress the YES syllable
by drawing 
> it out for 2 beats...  This poetic flexibility... is still found in the 
> renditions of the old singers of Sephardic vocal songs, making possible 
> versions which occasionally break the MUSICAL meter but generally stay 
> within the POETIC one. 

Actually, this is a standard feature of traditional singing in Spain,
and may in fact be something the Sephardim kept and developed as a
trait. 

Another thing which happens is that when Balkan area Sephardim adapt
local melodies, especially in compound metres, the Spanish (using the
term loosely) language often is not easily adaptable to patterns based
on Slavic, Greek or Turkish poetic structures, and ends up sounding very
peculiar indeed. 

> " 1) ....a rendition of a ballad by someone trainedextensively in classical 
> Turkish music and/or cantorial singing might result in a more 
> highly ornamented and elongated form than a rendition by an untrained singer. 

Actually, I've written about this difference also indicating a big
difference between male and female performance styles: except for
VIctoria Rosa Hazan, our early Sephardic recordings are not only of
trained Turkish and/or cantorial singers, they are - implicitly for the
time - of MALE trained Turkish and/or cantorial style singers. Much of
the repertoire, especially ballads and wedding songs, is mostly a
women's repertoire, but we don't have those early recordings of women.

> Strikingly different variants may be found of each and every tune, even 
> affecting such basic qualities as meter. For example, the song Bre Sarica, 
> commonly known in duple meter, is found here in a rare 7/8 meter version; and 
> the melody of Los caminos de Sirkeci, often found in Balkancountries in 7/8, 
> is here found in 6/8 meter.


Actually, I've heard "Los caminos de Sirkedzhí" mostly in a 5/8 metre.
The "Bre Sarica" 7/8 is interesting. Sometimes in modern (mid
20th-century on) performances of Balkan (not Jewish)songs, a song
typically sung in 7/8 will "degenerate" into 2/4 somewhere along the
way; this may in fact also have happened with Bre Sarica (one of my
favourite songs to sing), though not necessarily.


About Josh's comments on variations from one verse to another, etc. -
right on! 

> ......we were making a songbook to be used and reused (of course to be abused 
> is also a possibility) by the general public. 

Unfortunately, without an included recording, "abused" is more likely
than one likes to think, though not deliberately abused.
> 
> A musicological transcription will be quite different from a songbook 
> transcription..... ornaments scribbled down to the last tea-drop and 
> sometimes larger metric shifts which do not necessarily correspond to the 
> informant's "intention", but which occur "in-situ" and are therefore taken as 
> biblical writ.....

That's how we're taught to transcribe in ethnomusicology....

> , you can go to any conservatory anywhere in on this planet and be 
> totalitarily confronted with the tyranny of the written score.

Yup.
(See Bruno Nettl's semi-serious semi-tongue-in-cheek (and a delightful
read) on the ethnography of conservatories in North AMerica, "Heartland
Excursions".)
> 
> Many aspects of musical performance are left out of a transcription, one of 
> the most central being timbre. 

The absence of the typical timbre in most performances of Sephardic
music by non-Sephardim (and many performances by young Sephardim as
well) has been my Pet Peeve for years and years, as I've probably
written often enough here (including in my last message). 
Timbre is not just a small aspect, it's in many ways the ESSENCE of a
singing style. Mutual respect: one wouldn't perform late 19th century
opera in a Balkan village women's style, and one oughtn't to apply
Western vocal aesthetic standards to other traditions either. 

>  This is one of the stunning qualities of certain Sephardic tunes - the 
> feeling of a kind of ellision whereby the end of a musical phrase seems to 
> form the beginning of a new poetic line. 

In Moroccan Sephardic songs, very often there is also a deliberate
cyclical structure, where in standard notation it may seem as if it is a
"normal" structure but in performance, the singer avoids taking a breath
at the end of a verse, and elides the last sung note of the verse into
the first note of the next one, if necessary adding a couple of stepwise
passing notes to make the transition seamless. 

> > an angel visited me and ... I listened and lo, the angel toldeth me to use 
> > measures.
Hey, I could have told you to abandon measures judiciously and everyone
on this lists knows I'm no angel!!! 
tahnks for all the time you take to discuss these issues, it's great.
Judith

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