Bil Sabab Power Hour: Four Navajo Songs

What do you know about overly creative pointlessness if you haven't seen notation of the folk songs. Such things are amongst most bizarre out there. It is a nice example of justified simulacra. It is it but not exactly and not quite. Firm roots in the real thing are present - but it is definitely not the thing.  A sober compromise between fuzzy smooth distortion and stern oblivion. Still better than some vague recollections in general terms and color commentary. 

Notation seems to be reasonable as a form of documentation for the folk songs - it captures the melody and makes it possible to be performed by the outsiders. But that makes it a source of infinite distortions and misplacements.  

Below are four Navajo Songs from the collection of Geoffrey O'Hara. I have no idea how they've sounded like originally - but i see the notes and i can imagine something based on them. And i guess it is not exactly how it should have sounded like. I can only misinterpret it. But misinterpretation can be extremely effective creative practice if intensions are to go beyond into the unexpected and rather useless.

Take a look at the songs:

Notation is always a bit of a swerve. In cases of the folk songs it is a sort of commodification of the thing that was meant to be passed on from one to another without properly fixed form thus evolving and producing numerious offsprings - retellings, variations, continuations, etc. Folk song isn't meant to be documented by design. It just happens and exists just because why not. All its parts are moving, constantly changing over time - evolving into something else, rolling back to basics and then jumping into the outer space. That's how it works. 

Transporting a folk song into the realm of notation leaves out these vital parts. Thus folk song in notation is like an apparition. That what makes it a simulacra. It captures the essentials - melody, rhythms structure and lyrics, but it is not the thing. 

Notation also means the song should be performed as written without diversions to be that song - which is the opposite of how the folk songs are meant to be performed. Because there are no definitive versions of the folk songs - all of them are equal and completely dependent on the context they were born in. Which makes dominance of one documented versions over undocumented an odd case of survival of the fittest mostly by chance.