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- Title
JULIEN JALÂL ED-DINE WEISS -- KANUN'UN AKORTLAMASI İÇİN YENİ BİR ÖNERİ.
- Authors
Pohlit, Stefan; Beşiroğlu, Ş. Şehvar
- Abstract
Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, originally of French-Swiss descent, belongs to the foremost performers of the Middle-Eastern maqām tradition on the inter-national stage of World Musics. In 1976, at the age of 23, he started to play the Arab lute and then the qānūn, and henceforth left his country for studying with different teachers in North Africa, the Hejaz, and Turkey. Unlike any other West-European musician who converted to a foreign idiom, Weiss soon acquired notable fame as a qānūn player and founded one of today's most widely acknowledged formations for Middle-Eastern music: the ensemble "Al-Kindi". Through the study of the theoretical tradition as well as through practical experience in many Near-Eastern countries, Weiss acquired an exceptionally broad perspective over the whole repertoire. Feeling unsatisfied with tuning and pitch supply of common qānūn models, he started to develop a number of novel prototypes that would provide him with justly tuned intervals in an extended range of microtones. Two instruments have so far been constructed, one in 1990 and specialized in the tuning customs of the Arab world, another in 2007 and more suitable for the interpretation of the Ottoman repertoire. Today, these models constitute the most advanced qānūns that have ever been built. Their advanced structure reflects Weiss' immense command over the microtonal language of his art and his confidence as a modern Cartesian thinker between two cultural spheres. In their just intonation, drawing on simple integer ratios and providing the decisive intervals of the medieval treatises, these instruments are able to please acousticians, theorists, and practical performers. The aim of this study is to offer a basic introduction into structure and tuning of Julien Weiss' extended qānūn models. The primary sources were acquired in a manner comparable to field research, in continuous oral exchange with the musician. As a traveling artist who regularly performs with musicians from a variety of local backgrounds, Weiss discovered early in his career that theory and practice of Middle-Eastern music often contradict each other. Whereas all commonly used qānūn models are tuned upon the tempered 12-tone scale, temperament proves to be useless in the context of Middle-Eastern music. Since the earliest Arab treatises, theorists have distinguished major and minor semi- and whole-tones. The controversy over the note Segāh and other "neutral" scale steps of the fundamental scale can be traced back to Safīy al-Dīn's neo-Pythagorean 17-note scale from the 13th century. Weiss has put enormous stress on the study of Safīy al-Dīn's theoretical treatises, the "Šarafīy-yah" and the "Kitāb al-'Adwār" that created the earliest major disagreement to the older theories, such as those of Al-Farābī and 'Ibn Sīna. In shifting upwards, the important medius frets were reinterpreted upon a strictly Pythagorean system, com-posed uniquely of commas and limmas. Weiss, in pointing on a number of theoretical inconsistencies, suggests that the Systematist 17-note scale was never practiced in the way described by Safīy al-Dīn and that it was practically impossible to perform it with the lute fretting described in the Šarafyyīah. Today, the same theoretical discrepancy divides the Middle-Eastern tradition into two distinct spheres of influence: Performers in the Arab world understand the "neutral" degrees on the fundamental scale as "quarter-tones", while the Turkish theories of Raûf Yektâ, Hüseyin Sadettin Arel and Suphi Ezgi have resurrected the Systematist school within the extended 24-note pitch supply of the 20th century. Many different systems were proposed at the Congress of Cairo (1932). However, the participants departed without defining a general, compulsory system for the intonation of principal modal genres. As a mature tradition, the Middle-Eastern maqām system can no more rely on simplicist attempts to-wards one single fundamental scale. Similarly to Western polyphonic music--in which the intonation of apparently identical pitches changes upon harmonic context -- the Middle-Eastern system is composed of a plurality of dimensions. Although many modal genres seem to share common note names and pitch content, their refined charac-teristics often draw on subtle nuances in the intonation of apparently the same intervals. In disposing of six different "quarter-tone" intervals on every course of strings while keeping Pytha-gorean and harmonic ratios in precise tuning, Weiss' extended mandal systems finally enable exact tuning in the totality of local and historic contexts within the Middle-Eastern tradition. Comparably to Dimitrie Cantemir's tanbūr scale from the 17th century, they may well be described as the closest reflection of a Middle-Eastern tuning system in the 21st century.
- Subjects
ED-Dine Weiss, Julien Jalal; QANUN (Musical instrument); WORLD music; POPULAR music; ETHNOMUSICOLOGY
- Publication
Porte Akademik: Journal of Music & Dance Studies / Porte Akademik Müzik ve Dans Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2013, Vol 8, p197
- ISSN
2619-9688
- Publication type
Article