Re: more on transcription questions

[allen watsky <awatsky...>]

Hello All, The transcriptions are good enough, better than good enough. It
would be fun to hear the field recordings but not necessary. If you play the
stuff from the page as written if your accurate enough you will get the
transcribers intentions. If you play it enough you will be able to spin it ,
make it live. Sometimes I wonder if theres not already too much rote playing
of transcriptions. This is a source book. Catch the vibe and make some
music.Some new music maybe. Theres lots of recorded examples of 3rd
generation bands playing recreations of old music. Some of them succeed most
fail. Is it time for a smiley emotocon?  No! its time for more coffee.AW
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joshua Horowitz" <horowitz (at) budowitz(dot)com>
To: "World music from a Jewish slant" <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 2:01 PM
Subject: Re: more on transcription questions


Just a comment on why we have not released the recordings of the Songbook
(yet). Firstly, it is hard to find publishers who will do both and present a
decent publication. Peters Edition is not set up to do CD inlays and would
you reject an offer to publish with them? Even if we can arrange to get this
CD out, the transcriptions are often a combination of different
performances. This cut and paste process is born out of necessity not vanity
or aesthetics. There was a lot of archaelogical masonry work which was
necessary here. Sometimes we had a version of a songs which Aron himself
knew a variant to. When we worked on the song, he would say, lets use this
verse and this melodic turn of phrase. I like it this way. Because Aron
himself is a genuine source (one of the most incredible, I may add, with a
memory like a pentium processor) I never said, gee Aron, but is that
"authentic?" which would be like asking a rose if uses color dyes. I hope we
don't get into the criticism of why there is not a CD with this book. We're
working on it. Believe me after ten years struggling to get this farkakte
book out, it feels frustrating to have it pointed out that we didn't include
the cd when we fought with our sanity to get it included. Patience, maybe we
will get it out there, though I can't promise anything as it does not lie
within my jurisdiction....Josh


>From: Judith R Cohen <judithc (at) YorkU(dot)CA>
>To: World music from a Jewish slant <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
>Subject: more on transcription questions
>Date: Mon, Jan 14, 2002, 6:29 AM
>

> (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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