Investigating qeñet in Amhara secular music: an acoustic and historical study

Abstract

Since the 1960's, a kind of musicological gospel claims that Amhara secular music is based, supposedly from time immemorial, on a so-called closed system of four pentatonic modes or qәñәt called ambasäl (አምባሰል), anči hoye (አንቺ ሆዬ), bati (ባቲ) and tәzәta (ትዝታ), usually presented as a set of tempered or quasi-tempered intervals such as major and minor seconds and thirds. It is presented as an established, accepted and reliable norm, in scholarly as well as in general publications. Today urbanized azmaris (the wandering minstrels of the Amhara and Christian highlands) present it as the basic of traditional music – whereas azmaris of the deep countryside have simply no knowledge about it. This study aimed to re-explore in detail the Amhara secular scales, and to tackle in depth qәәñәәt historicity and its musicological relevance. To this end, a corpus of recordings dating back to 1939 have been analyzed and confronted with written sources. A control methodology was developed, in order to verify incoherent results due to age and quality of some of the recordings. A comparison with the intervals measured in songs recorded in 1976(by Cynthia Tse Kimberlin) and 2005 (by Stéphanie Weisser) was completed, covering therefore a period of about 70 years.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe