Re: measure for measure for measure for....

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

> Maybe I was unclear (almost certainly I was unclear), but I was not
> suggesting that vocal music never be transcribed without measure,s

 I think you were clear in suggesting that there are times when it is
appropriate and times when it is not, which is a good perspective to have.
Even in rubato renditions, like Arboles lloran por luvia, I chose to use
barlines and fermatas, but without meter rather than open scores because
throught through their combination you can get a better sense of the
phrasing of the performer than if you didn't use them (at least in my style
of transcription). This style of "proportional notation is very effective
when there is a metric sense to the piece, but it is not strict. Very few
performances dispense with the feeling for meter entirely. There is a
difference between what is called "free metered" and "non metered". Often
the doinas in klezmer music, for instance are called "non-metered" when in
fact they are usually quite metered, but use rubato judiciously. Even
calling them "free-metered" may not do them justice, because there is
usually a strong duple meter feeling to them, which is just stretched and
contracted.

> Unfortunately, without an included recording, "abused" is more likely
> than one likes to think, though not deliberately abused.

In our day and age, can one really talk about musical "abuse"?

*******************

>From: Judith R Cohen <judithc (at) YorkU(dot)CA>
>To: World music from a Jewish slant <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
>Subject: measure for measure for measure for....
>Date: Mon, Jan 14, 2002, 6:06 AM
>

> 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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