Lina Bahn Plays Yeagley Gypsy Music

I've just made my second attempt to present my music on YouTube: Rhapsody. This piece is part of a work called "Meditation and Rhapsody" for unaccompanied (solo) violin. It was written a year ago, and the world premiere was performed by Lina Bahn, violinist, at the National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington, DC, Sunday, October 8, 2006.

Lina Bahn, violinist

A rhapsody is generally understood as some sort of wild, frenzied dance, as in Bizet's opera Carmen (1875). Actually, the origin of the word is more enlightening. It comes from an ancient Greek word, rhapsoidia, which comprises two other words, rhaptein (to sew together) and aidein (to sing). A rhapsodist was one who sang epic poetry. In the ancient days, the history of the people was preserved in recited verse--in sung poetry. Yes, there was the inherent charm, and the historian/poet/singer was regarded as somewhat of a prophet. It was a 'high' to hear him. But, the word came to represent just the high itself, the "rapture," and that became associated with dance--or whatever you had to do to work yourself up into a frenzy.

The rhapsody became associated with the gypsies, because of their natural flair for music and dance, and general entertainment (--dare we say, swindling side shows?). The gypsies are an outcast Hindu people, from the sindhu (the "river," or India). When they began their migrations westward in the early 7th century, they brought with them the sitar, and the koko (later called the Persian revavah, and the Arab rebab)--the plantive instruments with seemingly unlimited pitches and plaintive notes. (Modern 'blues' musicians would call it all bending the notes.)

The gypsies were in the Balkans by the early 10th century. European music of course had evolved toward the natural overtone system of tuning musical pitches, which disallowed the quarter-tone pitches so peculiar to the Asian instruments. At least as early as Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) Europeans were fascinated with the gypsy music. They tried imitating the weird intonations on European instruments, and came up with a peculiar scale or two. Of course, Franz Liszt (1811-1886) is most famous for his piano transcriptions of gypsy music, called "Hungarian Rhapsodies." Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was still experimenting with gypsy melodic lines in the second movement of his "Estampes." (The 'gypsy' scale, in Western terms, is characterized by that lowered 2nd. Pitches are lowered or raised elsewhere, but that lowered 2nd seems to be the tell-tale alteration. Who knows, the gypsies may be the source of the Neopolitan 2nd. They were in Italy. They were in Corfu by the mid 14th century.)

While I was doing one of my masters in the late '70's at Emory University, I did a paper on the gypsy effect on Western music. It was called, "The Hired Mourners." I wrote it for my favorite professor, Lawrence Alexander, at the Institute of Liberal Arts. I proposed a thesis that gypsies represent the first transcontinental musical influence in music history, and I'm not talking about style. I'm talking about music theory, musical scales. Tuning. Pitches.

David A. Yeagley, American Indian classical composer.

In any case, I applied my own harmonic system to the gypsie spirit. "Rhapsody" provides the dramatic contrasts typical of the gypse allurement. It is swash-buckling, a bit, but that's the whole spirit. I have always been fascinating by solo violin, let alone the gypsies, who long ago made that instrument their lugubrious own. A solo violin is, I think, a fantastic experience. Add to this, the strange attraction of gypsie people, and I'm sold. I'm drawn to people who seem far away, from a different time, a different place, who live in two worlds. They are present, but distance. Indeed, it is a grandeur of distance that draws me. Of course, I never played the violin. I can scarcely remember ever holding one. (I think I was eleven years old.) But, we press on.

There were two American Indian women violinists programmed on the NMAI concerts in 2006, Heidi Senungetuk, and Tara-Louise Montour. I prosed a performance to both, months ahead of time. Ms. Senungetuk finally responded in a simple email that she wouldn't be able to do it. Montour never responded at all.

Enter: Lina Bahn. Lina, violinist for the Corigliano Quartet, and member of the Contemporary Music Forum (Steve Antosca, Director) was made available to me as a performer. I quickly sent her the score. After some weeks without hearing from her, I contacted her, only to find out she had lost the music! I was terrified, because I knew it wasn't an easy piece, and she had only a couple of weeks to learn it. Well, I sent her another copy, and in that very short time, she was able to render a rather snappy performance, I must say--in public. I was completely stunned.

Lina is ethnically Oriental, I am American Indian, and it was gypsy music. Why it made perfect sense, didn't it? We had the world covered--at least demographically, and perhaps ideologically as well. Aside from all that, I hope you enjoy the music. Hear the Rhapsody on YouTube. Louis Ballard loved it. "I'm going to steal your music," he said to me in Washington. "I like your double stops." Well, Lina, that was for you. (Double stops is when a violinist plays more than one string and the same time.)

Lina Bahn, violinist

Posted by David Yeagley at July 22, 2007 07:45 PM