Hello, how are you? I hope well.

Today this email reaches you a bit later. Until this morning I hadn’t decide which would be the focus of this email. I woke up later than I should, because I was dreaming about this song, Im Nin’Alu. I was dreaming and I didn’t want to wake up…

I dreamt a dream that is impossible to make real in the current circumstances: I was part of the cast for a theatre play based on this song. I would have to sing it in the play. All the actors were together around a table, with food and with the scripts, to organice the rehearsals.

Anyway, these guys from the video at the bottom sing better than me. I had this piece in mind since the edition about Suliman the Great, who sang some of this in his medley of Yemenite songs. If you didn’t read that one, click in the link. That recording is enchanting and their story is very interesting.

About this recording, the website of the Jewish Music Research Centre explains some facts. I will add comments here. In italics, their original texts: 

“Im nin’alu daltei nedivim is a shira by Shalem Shabazi, signed Alshabazi. This poem is one of the most popular and widely known among the Yemenite Jews. It is sung on many different occasions, at weddings and other celebrations, to many melodies.”  

Im nin’alu daltei n’divim daltei marom lo nin’alu means Even if the gates of the rich are closed, the gates of heaven will never be closed. If you understand Hebrew, check this page of the National Library of Israel. If you don’t understand Hebrew, anyway you can listen to many other recordings of this poem.

Shalem Shabazi (you can find it written as Shalom too) was a Yemenite Jewish poet from 17th century, of whom there are around 550 poems. He was a weaver as his main profession and he is though to be quite poor. He wrote in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. He has a reputation of a heroe and his tomb in Ta’izz, in the Southwest of Yemen, attracted pilgrims all year long and specially aroubd Shavout. After the Operation Magic Carpet there were no Jews left in the city. The exact place of the tomb has been lost. You can read more about him in this site of Diarna.

If i didn’t tell you they are the same song, would you have noticed? I wouldn’t. This violinist is Oedoen, or Ödön, Pártos..

The album includes several versions of the poem, by different artists, and they comment:

“Each performer chooses which stanzas of the complete song suit him or his tradition, and the occasion on which it is performed. He also chooses which melodies to sing, for the sake of variety.”

I want to highlight this part, because it is something similar to what happens in many traditions, including mine, the popular music from Spain, in many of its shapes: there is the concept of styles, that means that the performer has a frame of work, composed by a corpus of melodies (that are just the base and he or she can change, can include other melismata, adapts to the tonality, adapt to the lyrics to say the words in a meaningful way…) and a corpus of stanzas (in the tradition of Spain there are many anonymous stanzas or couplets, that can be chosen according to the will of the performer (who can also create new ones).

With this piece, Im’nin alu, we see how, from the versions from the people, very different between them (you will note this specifically if you listen to the several versions in the album, don’t miss it) performed just for fun or to celebrate, in which the personal will and the circumstances of the moment made each performance different (also the different performances by the same artist), in which the song didn’t have a closed number of stanzas, in which the role of improvisation was high, goes on crystallising in the form of a song. This example is specially interesting because it has produced so many versions and with the time all are much more recognizable as the same song as in the recordings of the album we are talking about. Check more versions:

The notes of the song in the website explain some interesting facts. I explain the words in bold, under the notes:

“Shalom Keisar (NSA studio, 27.1.77; YC 1181), accompanying himself on a drum, with the Kiryat Ono male voice ensemble, sing the first and last stanzas accompanied by hand clapping. The singer opens with the song’s most widely known melody, which was popularized by Bracha Zefira among the Jewish community of Palestine. It is sung in a responsorial manner: the soloist sings the opening hemistich and the choir the closing hemistich. The tawshihִ is sung to another, faster melody. It is usually sung in a responsorial manner, as follows: the soloist sings the first verse, and the choir the second, the soloist sings the second verse and the choir the third. At the end of the song the singers sing a third, slower melody, and a coda-like passage, and then repeat the last two verses at a faster tempo, followed by the blessing Vekulkhem berukhim (You all are blessed).”

The hemistich is a half-line of verse. This term applies to poetic meter with long verses. Between the hemistichs there is a caesura. Remember the schema we have also above: -˘˘- -˘˘- – / -˘˘- -˘˘- There you see the caesura between the hemistichs.

And the tawshih is a type of vocal suite, religious, in Yemeni tradition, related to the qawma (according to the The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: The Middle East). And what is qawma? This looks like a gymkhana… According to Mahmud Guettat, the qawma from Yemen would be the fasil in Turkey, the wasla in Egypt, the maqam in Irak, el sawt from the countries of the Gulf. So, these are a system of melodic modes. I found Guettat’s explanation mentioned in a work by Sergi Sancho Fibla (Arrels mediterrànies de la música canareva: Reconstrucció de possibles vestigis ancestrals en les cançons populars d’Alcanar).

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