more on transcription questions

[Judith R Cohen <judithc...>]

(warning: I thought this would be short but it's long.)

Hi, thought I should mention that probably the reason I've been
responding at such length to Josh's transcription postings is that it's
been on my mind a lot , as I'm spending a lot of time (and energy) (and
frustration) transcribing two different repertoires of Sephardic songs,
for publication.

The first is directly related to the material in Josh and Aron's book,
the second is Moroccan and resulted in the "Ma'oz Tsuriss" posts I sent
in December.

The Salonica corpus is all ballads (romances) - by the time Aron's
family including David Saltiel was singing in Salonica, the romance
repertoire there had all but disappeared from daily practice. (There are
only three in the book, and all use the most common melodies used for
those specific ballads - "El rey que muncho madruga" (this is the
incipit: the "official" title is Landarico); "Lavaba la blanca niña"
(title: La vuelta del marido) and "Tres hermanicas" (what I have always
considered the boring tune for it, as opposed to the lovely ornamented
one from Rhodes - title "Hero y Leandro")).

Anyway, to go back to the Salonica corpus I'm talking about - these
ballads were recorded by Estreya Aelion,who has since died, at a very
advanced age - over 90. The words are remarkably clear and complete -
amazing versions of ballads which haven't been sung, for the most part,
in decades; and on the tapes I'm using for transcription, Estreya Aelion
is full of sharp, often amusing, remarks (in Judeo-Spanish) about what
she is singing.

So - verbally, there is nothing wrong with her memory.

But transcribing the music is a nightmare. The pitches - are they
deliberate microtones of a vestigial maqam system? or mistakes? or both?
Sometimes they're completely indecipherable. The rhythms - the less said
the better. The wild differneces from verse to verse, which usually (but
not always) seem much more than typical melodic variation.

So how much is loss of memory, loss of functioning vocal chords etc, and
how much is this one person's idiosyncracies as a perfomrer, and how she
hears/wants to hear the songs? NOTE: She herself says over and over that
she has never considered herself a singer, even in the community sense,
and this must influence how one sees things as well.

In a couple of cases, it was clear that she MEANT to use a 7/8 metre but
it gets lost along the way. Does one scrupulously change time signatures
every few measures in the transcription, or put in a note that this
seems to be a muddled version of a fairly straightforward 7/8 tune?

etc etc etc etc. Fortunately, the editor of the volume IS including a CD
of most of the original sung versions. While, of course, this means my
transcriptions are open to criticism form anyone who cares to compare
them with the CD; it also means that people can HEAR how she sings; if
they want to use the transcriptions as a guide or for comparative
analysis à la Bartók, that's ok, but what is sadly , for whatever
reaosn, missing in Josh and Aron's book - the SOUND - will be there, and
at very little added financial cost.

Now, the Moroccan repertoire - Solly Levy wants to produce a CD with
book anthology of the Tangier piyyutim repertoire, which is generally
not part of the reperotire recorded by Zrihan, Louk, Amar et al. except
for occasional pieces common to most Moroccan Sephardic tradition. 
Solly has a wonderful verbal and musical memory. He generally sings in
tune and when he doesn't, usually realizes it and corrects it.  He is
incredibly intelligent and articulate, and we have great discussions
about anomalies in metrical patterns etc etc. The problem is: there are
a LOT of metrical anomalies. Some are simply part of this repertoire.
Many are done one way in one synagogue and another way in another and so
on, so, as Josh says, there is no one definitive version- but also,
Solly himself is actually interested in standardizing some of these
anomalies in the CD/book. As an ethnomusicologist and also a traditional
performer I'm torn - by nature, conviction and training, used to seeing
these variants as valuable and much more than quirks, but this is
Solly's own tradition, and if he says a lot of the anomalies are really
petrified old errors and he wants them "straightened out" who am I to
tlel him what to do with his own tradition? We approach each song
separately, and sing and talk it through, are asking other people from
the tradition etc etc. (Ay, as Josh well knows, if we were paid by the
hour....)

But - in one specific Hanuka piyyut which we were singing in our
Vancouver concert,neither I nor the two guest musician friends who
performed with us there could figure out the metrical pattern Solly
insisted was the RIGHT one. We offered him a soultion which seemed to
all of us to be likely and he said no, that couldn't be it. So we spent
a long time adjusting our instrumental (oud and percussion)
accompaniment to it, though it seemed completely atypical.
Then, a week after the concert, Solly called me up and played an Emil
Zrihan recording of it over the phone, saying "This is it! THIS is how
it's done!"
You guessed it. It was EXACTLY the simple solution we had proposed...


The moral to all this?
Go figure.
BUT LISTEN TO THE SINGERS, MAKE THE SINGING AVAILABLE. 

cheers, Judith

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