The Way in Which Voice of the Turtle works. Writtten by Lisle Kulbach Over the years Voice of the Turtle has developed different ways of working on the Sephardic material it studies. The research end of the group's work has always been done by Judith Wachs, the Artistic Director and visionary of the group. At the beginning she pursued the gathering of the music through libraries and written material. Volumes of songs that had been gathered and written down by a few collectors in the 19th and 20th century were found in libraries around the Boston area (Harvard and Brandeis Universities), as well as in London. One group of volumes which Voice of the Turtle used extensively was a collection by Isaac Levy, a Turkish Sephardic singer and musician, who garnered many songs from his own family and environs. The Sephardic tradition had been an oral one from its inception, most of the words were in Ladino (medieval Castilian Spanish) although there were other words in songs which reflected the countries in which these Jews had lived since the Expulsion, such as Greek, Turkish, as well as Hebrew. The words to the volumes of music which Voice of the Turtle first used were written in a modern form of Spanish, and contained translations in French. The notation of the music was very regular, mostly in 4/4, or 3/4, western rhythms, and the notes themselves were written as if they all belonged to a western scale, i.e. there were no 1/4 tones. Not realizing that any of this could be different from the sound of actual Sephardic singing, Voice of the Turtle revelled in the harmonic minor keys, and the Spanish of it all, working up arrangements on their newly found or donated near eastern instruments, the saz, the kemenje, the oud, finger cymbals, the dumbek, and exercised their voices as soloists, none of them ever having particularly been soloists before. They continued to use the instruments they had "grown up" with, the guitar, the violin, medieval harp. At a certain point, after making one or two recordings, Judith went to Israel, to continue research into this field. She began to meet and get to know the ethnomusicolgists who work in the, gathering together of all Jewish music, library in Jerusalem called the Phonoteka. She played VOT tapes which had thus far been produced and the ethnomusicologists, as one, proclaimed them wonderful but too clean. Judith came back to Boston with this news. Too clean. Too clean. "When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." What did too clean mean? It meant, the Voice of the Turtle needed to learn about 1/4 tones. It also meant that the focus of the music making had to change. The primary group training, together, had been to play and sing renaissance music where the total group sound has to be blended, perfectly outlined. Individuals should not really stick out in for instance a madrigal or a mass. The whole group had to move as one, and do everything the same way, in order to produce an end result of extraordinary harmony. Sephardic music seemed to have a slightly different basis of expression. It seemed to be an expression of each person's personal relationship to the material at hand that drove the music. The more strongly each person had taken in the meaning of a song, with the sound of it, the more the song achieved it's fulfillment. This almost implied not particularly listening to each other while playing, but perhaps listening to the music and responding to it. Perhaps in the end it's the same thing, but it felt quite different at the time. VOT also took a mini workshop with Bob Labaree (an expert on Turkish music) at this time. Bob explained the concept of the 1/4 tone, that it was very much like a blue note in the makam (or scale) in the oriental tradition. It was there to add color and spice, perhaps emotion, to that part of the tune. His explanation helped to free the group from paranoia about being exact about how to play "that" note. There was room for self expression. At this time, Judy began to bring tapes back from Israel which she had gleaned and garnered (with her friends the musicologists) from the Phonoteka. Voice of the Turtle had begun its Paths of Exile Series and the first Path was to Morocco. Tapes and tapes were listened to over and over again of elderly Moroccan Sephardim, men and women, singing wedding songs, playing percussion, playing reed instruments. Their sound was very different from anything the Turtles could do, or would even aspire to. A delicate median had to be found. A Jewish family called the Mizrachis had moved to Boston from Iran. They wanted to be friends with Voice of the Turtle and invited them for dinner. Sitting on the floor around a table cloth and eating near eastern food, the family wondered whether everyone would like to sing together? After deciding on a tune known by everyone, the singing began. For Lisle (since I can't speak for anyone else) it was a landmark experience. The concept of "singing" took place in a very different experiential plane from the western one, at least from the one Lisle had understood up until then. Accuracy of pitch was not a priority. The priority was a steady flow of words almost chanted together to produce a forward group motion which was undeniable. Either you were in it or you were not. It was like being in a river. What an interesting experience that was. From then on, Voice of the Turtle worked from tapes, understanding that much of the rhythm of a song derived from the words. The meter of the lines from verse to verse might not repeat exactly, and therefore, the tune and rhythm might change subtly between verses. If the group was going to accompany the singer, and those changes were going on, everyone had to know that. There was nothing mechanical about the experience. Voice of the Turtle has discovered that making arrangements are a large part of why they love working with Sephardic music. There is a process to making an arrangement which includes staying loyal to the original tune and words (although, one can in folk music find many variants of both, and have to first decide which one to choose), and then trying, experimenting to see whether the best route (according to your present feelings about the situation) would be to follow the general orchestration of the country of origin (for instance, if a song is from Turkey, to use the "Turkish orchestra", saz, kememje, oud, dumbek), or is imagination the way to go? For one romanca the group combined tenor viol with guitar and clarinet. They love it.

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