RE: borrowing tunes

[music <music...>]

Our estimable Canadian colleague wrote in response to my
observation that borrowing melodies in Jewish music may be
"as old as the Psalms":
 
> Hi, yes, Robert, seemingly a practice at least as old as the psalms,
> where one sees that certain ones are to be sung to the "lakhan of..."
> presumably some well-known tune of the time. 

I believe that this embeds a small error.  It is the mysterious so-called
"superscriptions" in many of the Psalms--though not the ones that
simply attribute the Psalm to David or whomever--that have occasioned
(often learned) speculation that the melody to which the Psalm was 
intended to be sung was being specified.  (Alfred Sendrey refers to
the broader problem as "the enigma of the psalm headings.")  

This is particularly so when a word or phrase of uncertain reference is 
preceded 
by the Hebrew word "al" (spelled with an ayin), which perhaps meant "Sing 
this 'to' or (as it were) 'after'" the tune specified by what follows:  Al 
Ayelet 
Hashachar (Ps. 22), Al Shoshanim (Pss. 45, 69, 80).  (Alternatively, it is
possible that some [or most, or all] of these headings refer to musical
instruments upon which the Psalm was to be performed, or a mode to
which they were to be sung; see, e.g., Pss. 5, 8, and 9, among many
others.)

So far as I know, however, the word "lakhan" (meaning tune/air/melody) does
not appear anywhere in the Psalm headings or superscriptions; if it does, I'd
very much like to be informed of that and. if so, in which.

My guess--again, though, I may be mistaken--is that Judith has approrpiated
this usage from Sephardic *siddurim* (prayerbooks--I assume they use the
same word?), in which "lakahn" does indeed appear, to indicate to what
melody a given tefilah (prayer) or piyyut (hymn) is to be sung.  Its use in
this context parallels the use of the word "Tune" or "Air" to identify the 
melody
to which so-called broadside ballads were to be sung.  (The earliest publication
[sfawk] of "The Star Spangled Banner," for example, carried the words "Tune--
Anacreon in Heaven" [or "To Anacreon in Heaven" or "The Anacreontic Song"],
the then well known song, of an English poetry-and-drinking society--Isn't even
the *idea* of such a society exhilarating?--to which it was to be sung.)

Again, if "lakhan" *does* appear in any of the Psalm headings--or in any of the
Psalms, for that matter--I'd be grateful to learn about it.

--Robert Cohen, who obsesses on the subject of borrowed melodies

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