I also have an Ali Khalifa; mine is from 1998, and so manufactured after his death. It is a different shape than yours (my bowl is a little longer
and less heart shaped), but it also required a fair amount of work to make it playable.
My neck was alright, but it came with the largest bridge in history, a whopping 2 inches high. It was a gift from my father, for whom it was
unplayable, but he hoped that I'd work on it, because it had a sweet sound to it.
I've cut the bridge down to size, redrilled the string tie in holes, which brought the action down to 3mm; recut the nut, adjusted the peg box
fittings, shaped new pegs, etc. I'd still like to rebuild the peg box, because as it stands, it encroaches to much into the neck from the back. It
doesn't have a deep base sound like my Sukar/Sukkar, but my Sukar can not complete with the beauty of the Khalifa's trebles.
That cantiga is very nice. It is part of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which was written during the reign of Alfonso X, a supporter of a Spanish
translation movement of Arabic texts.
Oddly enough, I am going to cite the same man I did in a previous post, but because that post inspired me to re-read an interview with him in which
this topic is covered. I cite this as an opinion that influences me, as I have heard a few cantigas performed by various musicians with differing
sounds, and so this does seem to make a bit of sense. And in music, arrangements are everything.
http://www.afropop.org/multi/interview/ID/57/Dwight+Reynolds:+Al-An...
" B.E.: That gives a good transition into talking about Cantigas of Santa
Maria. This is a set of pieces commissioned, some perhaps even written, by Alfonso X, "el Sabio," a Christian king who maintained Muslim and Jewish
musicians in his court. Why are the Cantigas important and what do they tell us?
D.R.: First of all, this collection called las Cantigas of Santa Maria, attributed to Alfonso X, is one of the richest collections of
songs from that period that we have. Not only does it give us the lyrics, but every single one of them is notated, and it's in a notation that we can
actually understand to a great degree. In contrast to much of the notation that we have for the troubadours gives us where the melody goes up and
down, but it gives us nothing to go on concerning the rhythm or the length of the notes. SO we can't tell how long the note was held. In contrast, the
notation to the cantigas is actually available to us and so we can actually perform approximations of those melodies. It's a rich and wonderful
songbook. It has a notation system that we can actually understand. And even more so, it has a series of beautifully crafted miniatures, little
paintings, painted on the various pages, that give us some of the best images we have of medieval musical instruments and, quite famously, presents
several images of Moors and Christians performing together.
B.E.: I have found a wide range of Cantigas recordings, some involving Arab instruments, the oud and rebec and Arab percussion,
others more European, one involving the Orchestra of Fez. Talk about the freedom musicians have now to interpret this unusual songbook.
D.R.: Well, when you listen to recordings of modern performances of the cantigas, you're going to hear an entire spectrum of
different styles. We know approximately what the melody was. We know nothing about the rhythm. We know somewhat what instruments were probably
involved in the performances because we have the miniatures that actually give us pictures, images of those instruments. But at the same time, we
really don't know what the style was, what it sounded like, what the timbre of the voices was. So those people who come to the Cantigas de Santa Maria
primarily as a European group, interpreting early European music will very often portray those cantigas with the vocabulary that they have acquired as
musicians of early European music. Other people are making choices realizing the cultural mixing that was going on specifically, right there, in
Toledo, during Alfonso X's time, and taking their clues from the images, the miniatures that are in the manuscript itself. Some of these are chosing
to use styles and timbres that are much more Middle Eastern.
It's very intriguing for us to realize the degree to which we recognize a style of music by very superficial features, by the timbre of voice that's
used for example, or by the type of instrument. So it's quite possible, and you can hear this in recordings of the cantigas, to take exactly the same
melody and to sing it in a European style and it will sound to you like it could have been performed in Paris, and turn around and sing that same
melody and use a consciously selected Arab style, and you'll think that it came right out of the Middle East. In fact, the melody has stayed the same,
and it's really only the vocal technique and the timbre that have changed. So if you add the vocal technique and the timbre and chose Middle Eastern
instruments, or European instruments, choose what we think medieval European rhythms might have been, or use Middle Eastern percussion instruments and
choose modern Middle Eastern rhythms, you can see that this same piece of music can end up sounding to the average listener as if it came from two
completely different continents. "
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