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Cohen, Dalia, and Ruth Katz. Palestinian Arab Music: A Maqam Tradition in Practice. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xi, 518 pp., tables, graphs, charts, transcriptions of music and text, appendices, endnotes, bibliography, index, compact disc.
Palestinian Arab Music: A Maqam Tradition in Practice is a weighty undertaking by Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz, each of whom is a senior academic and professor emeritus of musicology at the Hebrew University. The authors have drawn upon their many years of experience to "uncover an inherently concealed regularity in practice" within "the folk songs of Palestinian Arabs who now live within the borders of Israel" (p. 1). In particular, the subject of the investigation is Palestinian folksong performances recorded by the authors in the 1960s, and as such, the aim is "to characterize the music of a certain group as it appears in practice" (p. 332). This is a particularly social-scientific study featuring chapter organization with progressively numbered subdivisions and with recurring methodology, findings, and summary sections. It relies heavily upon quantification of musical characteristics and upon statistical methods.
Chapter one explicates the domain, methodology, aims, and pertinent issues of the investigation. The authors identify the folksong genres as "musicopoetic genres" that "have their own names" (p. 3, original emphasis), in advance of chapter seven, where this manner of labelling is addressed in detail as "musicopoetic frames." The statistical methods include employing questionnaires devised "to facilitate computer processing" (p. 4) and used to obtain information about song texts and musical parameters. Pointing to the Cohen-Katz Melograph developed in Jerusalem in 1957, the authors consider the melograph to be underemployed and to have "fallen victim to a misunderstanding" among ethnomusicologists. In contrast, they systematically use it to analyse intervals "on the microscopic planes that may prove to be relevant" (pp. 4-5). The authors endeavoured to select their "informants" to be sociologically representative of all sectors of Palestinian society and to include "skilled instrumentalists and singers" as well as "professional or semiprofessional singers" (p. 5). Some 600 song performances were recorded, over half of which were analysed in detail (p. 6), and analysis...