Okonsar, Hatikvah

[steltz]

http://imslp.org/wiki/Hatikvah_(Okonsar ... MSLP262504

Okonsar calls this a transcription, but it is probably more technically an arrangement. It has no additions, and is the song, singable in verses (with words specified (the original words, I think)), just with his accompaniment.

As far as I understand, transcriptions have their own pages because they inevitably involve added original material by the transcription composer.

Okonsar's Hatikvah doesn't seem to have any added original material, and functions like the original song. Would it not be more accurately placed on a page for Hatikvah (Folk Songs, Jewish), under an arrangements header?

[Davydov]

For folk songs and similar traditional works without a single author, it's the arranger who is the sole copyright holder of their work, so it sounds like it should indeed be under Okonsar's name.

Incidentally, the use of "Folk Song, XXX" as author proved problematic for a number of reasons, so it should be avoided where possible.

[Melodia]

Hatikvah isn't technically a folk song -- it's a specific arrangement of a folk song (and NOT a Jewish one), by Samuel Cohen.

[Davydov]

In that case it belongs under Cohen's name, as an arrangement by Okonsar. So long as Okonsar used Cohen's version as the source of his arrangement, that is.

[steltz]

From Wikipedia:

The melody for Hatikvah derives from La Mantovana, a 17th-century Italian song, composed by Giuseppe Cenci (Guiseppino del Biado) ca. 1600 with the text "Fuggi, fuggi, fuggi da questo cielo". Its earliest known appearance in print was in the del Biado's collection of madrigals. It was later known in early 17th-century Italy as "Ballo di Mantova." This melody gained wide currency in Renaissance Europe, under various titles, such as the Polish folk song "Pod Krakowem", Romanian “Cucuruz cu frunza-n sus” (“Maize with up-standing leafs”) and the Ukrainian "Kateryna Kucheryava."[5] This melody was also famously used by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana in his symphonic poem celebrating Bohemia, “Má vlast,” as “Vltava” (Die Moldau).

The adaptation of the music for Hatikvah was done by Samuel Cohen in 1888. Cohen himself recalled many years later that he had hummed Hatikvah based on the melody from the song he heard in Romania, "Carul cu boi" ("The Ox Driven Cart").

AND from Oxford Music's article on national anthems:
Israel: Kol od balevav (known as Hatikvah ( N. H. Imber , 1878 ; mus. trad., arr. S. Cohen ).

[Melodia]

Right. But compare Hatikvah to The Moldau, and you can see how it's not exactly necessarily the same rhythm, etc.

[steltz]

We don't have the Cohen version, so I don't have anything to do the comparison with. For the moment, I've left it under Okonsar's name. I've tagged it as a national anthem, but apart from the fact that he does call in an "arrangement" on the actual music, I find the instrumentation odd - Mr. Okonsar put it as piano, but the work clearly has the verses of the words in three languages, so I tagged it for piano, and added tags for voice and piano, and voices and piano, and added those possibilities in the instrumentation field.