Re: [HG-new] Digest for hurdygurdy@googlegroups.com - 7 Messages in 3 Topics

[Henry Boucher]

Le 09-12-12 à 02:20, hurdy...@googlegroups.com a écrit :

 .....but one reason that I never do is the consideration that I wasn't actually there in the middle ages and the renaissance. I can make guesses about how it might have sounded and others can too, but we can never really know, so there are pretty sharp limits to the judgments we can make. 

         Guesses ?   Here it is not the musician who answers  but the  history buff .    People who  do research  are  always  arguing among themselves  on certain points

    but generally agree on a a basic knowledge  on a subject .  What you call  " guess "   is a " working hypothesis "  which gets  proven or denied  over time .

    

          But at this point , I would like to bring another  point of view .   For Americans  the HG may be the   " coolest thing "   for a while  until the next fashion comes up .

  For other people , it is a national /familial /cultural/historical/whatever   tradition .  For most of us the HG does not really mix with belly dancing  and  people for who

belly dancing is familial or cultural  tradition do not think much of HG either.    Métissage that is fun on a camping ground in France is close to annoying on a YouTube

clip made in the USA ,  but this is something Americans can not imagine.   

         I wonder   how Belgians  felt when they heard jazz music played on the saxophone  for the first time ?  Maybe the history of the HG has now moved to the

USA  as the  Scottish    bagpipe had to go through  England   to be known all over the  British empire and former colonies  ?  History will tell.    

 Henry , dit Tourblanche  .

[Augusto de Ornellas Abreu]

but wait

 

there are hurdygurdies all over europe - from Russia and Hungary, up until Galiza (in Spain)

 

the scale on the Tekero, for example, follows one of the Arabic/Turkish maqaamaat (arabic modes) and some of the Hungarian HG melodies are the same I have seen bellydanced to in the Middle East. Exactly the same tunes!

 

The HG is not only confined to a couple of French rural regions...

 

Augusto

Brazil

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[Arle Lommel]

Hi Augusto.

I'm wondering the basis for the claim that the Hungarian HG follows Arabic/Turkish modes? The tuning, aside from absolute pitch, is identical to the French instrument. The keyboard looks different (because of the spaces in it), and yes, one key looks inverted compared to a piano, but the lower row (the only row on some of the earliest examples known) plays the Ionian (major scale), and the upper row simply adds in the missing pitches on the Western diatonic scale (and no, it doesn't use any quarter tones). So I'm a bit confused about what you're trying to say. I know you play the Hungarian instrument, so you do know what you're talking about, and I suspect that I've misunderstood what you wanted to say, but without further explanation, your statement conveys something about the Hungarian instrument that isn't the case (that it uses a "different" scale from most European instruments).

Now it is true that Hungarian HG music uses a lot of modes besides Ionian, including Mixolydian (very common), Lydian (less common), Dorian (extremely common), and Aeolian (very common), all of which appear in the HG repertoire, but the modes one plays and the instrument's basic scale are two different things. Other modes, notably the Hungarian Gypsy scale (which does correspond to a maqam in the Kurd family), appear frequently in Hungarian music, but are not often found in the Hungarian HG repertoire. Maqāmāt consist of multiple ajnas, but the combinations are not fixed, so no single keyboard would be an "Arabic" keyboard.

However, if you assume an Ajam-family maqam, your statement would be generally true of both French and Hungarian HGs (as well as all diatonic major scale Western instruments), so that wouldn't seem to be what you mean as it wouldn't differentiate or tell us anything other than that there are Ajam maqāmāt that generally correspond to the western Ionian scale.

Regarding the bellydance repertoire, that I have less trouble seeing, since maqāmāt corresponding to the Hungarian modes (none of which are uncommon in Western folk music) exist and there was a considerable period of musical exchange in the region and ongoing contact with Balkan music where your statement about using Arabic modes is indubitably true.

Best,

-Arle

[Augusto de Ornellas Abreu]

I was making reference to that odd key on the top (which I love, btw)... With it (no need for quarter tones), it is very easy to play many Arabic-Turkish tunes.

 

What I meant too was what you mentioned on your last paragraph. There was (as still is to a point) a lot of exchange between Eastern Europe and the muslim world, especially via Turkey and the Ottomans. Many tunes that the Arabs or the Turks claim that are theirs, the Greek, the Bulgarian or even the Hungarian claim the same.

 

An example (which is great for bellydancing, BTW) is "Üsküdara" (there are great videos of it on youtube, especially one by a Spanish group called Mediterranea or something like it), which the Arabs call "Yaa banaat Iskadariyya" and the Greeks, "Apo Xeno Topo"