Explorations in the Music of the Samaritans

srael presents unique opportunities for ethnomusicological research given that various cultural groups, suddenly transplanted from many parts of the world, are juxtaposed in a small geographic area. Essentially, there are three basic problems which present themselves. First of all, one can study the music of each of the many groups before changes take place. Secondly, one can observe the process of acculturation as it is reflected in music. Third, and perhaps most challenging, one can search for common elements in the various musical traditions, given that these groups all trace their derivation from the very same ancient Jewish heritage. Virtually all the work that has been done up to now has centered around the first of these problems-that is, recording and analyzing musical materials gathered among the various Oriental ethnic groups-and, of course, this is the logical pre-requisite both for the study of acculturation and the search for common Jewish elements.2 Since this music is non-European, research in Israel has been confronted with the problem of interval measurement. Experiments in this area have made use of the monochord and the oscillograph, the limitations of which are self-evident. Not only are these systems incapable of rendering a picture of a melody as a whole, but they even introduce difficulties in the process of measuring a single tone. The need has long been felt in Israel, as it has been felt by ethnomusicologists elsewhere, for a method that would make a graphic record of a melodic line. But although we had heard mention of various attempts, by musical scholars and others, to make such graphic records of sound, nobody in Israel had employed such a method nor were we able to locate any blueprint to guide us. We therefore set out to design an instrument for this purpose and with the aid of a grant from the Leonie Guinzburg Music Endowment at the Hebrew University and the cooperation of the Department of Physics we successfully built an instrument suitable for musicological use. We have subsequently discovered, of course, that our invention has a venerable history, although it appears that the only two instruments that resemble our own are those of Olav Gurvin and Charles Seeger, both of which seem to have been created almost simultaneously with ours. While all such machines are based on the transformation of sound waves into electric

Acculturation · Aesthetics · Art · Ethnic group · Ethnomusicology · Literature · Melody · Musical · Musical notation · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropology · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Music and Audio Processing · Music Technology and Sound Studies