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

[Eliott Kahn <Elkahn...>]

This was a wonderful dialogue which I learned much from. Thank you both, Josh 
and Judith.

Eliott Kahn



At 09:06 AM 1/14/02 -0500, you wrote:
>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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