“If you speak it -it is no legend” \u00a0is a sound installation consisting of four original pieces written by Israeli and Polish composers. The common base of these works is the use of the voices of non-Jewish speakers who live in Israel – foreign workers and refugees from different countries, for whom Hebrew is primarily a functional language of communication.<\/div>\n

The words that the speakers were requested to articulate were chosen from a selection handwritten on the first empty pages of a copy of the book titled “Reshimat milot ha-yesod le-hora’at ha-lashon ha-l’vrit” (A Basic Word List of Hebrew), published in Jerusalem in 1960 by the Department of Education and Culture in the Diaspora of the World Zionist Organization, edited by Y. Mehlman, H. B. Rosen and Y. Shaked.<\/p>\n

The copy was purchased in Jerusalem in the Galleria le-Sifrut bookstore on Shats St, by Sala-manca. The choice of words included in the chapter ‘Principles of Selecting the Words’ is a didactic-linguistic one, whose point of departure is that the language to be learned is ‘living Hebrew’, as spoken and written in Israel. According to the editors, most of the 1,000 words included are useful for con versational topics and for the construction of basic sentences, maintaining that a basic knowledge of the language cannot be achieved without these selected words. It is apparent from the sticker on the book that the aforementioned additional list was chosen from the basic list of words by Dr. Edward Horowitz – who, it appears from a search on the Internet -was the author of the book. How the Hebrew Language Grew, also published in 1960. The recordings of the words and short conversations with the speakers were made by Aviad Albert and Bynia Reches in Bamat Meitzag at the new Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. Twenty-eight speakers – men and women, and two children – participated, all coming from different backgrounds: China, Eritrea, India, Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines, Romania, Sudan, Ukraine, and others. Each speaker was asked to read the list of words from a Latin transcription.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The recording collection reveals an emphasis on the phonological aspect and the differences in accents. The focus on the characteristics of speech sounds and their musical value is linked to modern music’s search for musical expression by means of speech. The focus on non- Jewish voices is connected to a search for expression that is devoid of the ideological-national influences that accompanied the revival and development of the modern Hebrew language, while giving way to a musicality that is less familiar in today’s Tel Aviv Hebrew.<\/div>\n

The selection of the Zimmer club as the location for presenting the installation is not a neutral choice. The club is located near or within the communities of many of the speakers, and is a new space, unique and independent from contemporary Tel Aviv’s artistic and musical sphere. It is a location where different and experimental methods merge without any economic or political considerations.<\/div>\n

demo of the music
\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Lea Mauas, Diego Rotman<\/div>\n<div>Sala-Manca Group<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/imgres-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-493\" src=\"http:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/imgres-1-300x150.jpg\" alt=\"imgres-1\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" srcset=\"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/imgres-1-300x150.jpg 300w, https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/imgres-1-210x105.jpg 210w, https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/imgres-1.jpg 318w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The first presentation of the work took place in February 2009 in the Zimmer club within the framework of the ‘Contempo’ International Festival of Contemporary Music and Video Art in Tel Aviv, and formed part of the Polish Year in Israel 2008\/09, Tel Aviv-Yafo Centennial as well as Turning Sounds 6, international meeting.<\/div>\n<div>The initial idea behind the project, which I conceived in September 2008, during the Dialogue of Four Cultures Festival in \u0141od\u017a, and which was later developed and transformed by Sala-Manca during our curatorial collaboration, was to address the relatively short, rapid history of Tel Aviv’s ethnic and ethnohistorical diversity. It addresses such issues as the formation of the community, its homogenization, and its parallel diversification due to ongoing immigration. Significantly, I was interested in the historical immigration arriving from Poland, as reflected in a saying I overheard, that early after World War II, Polish was commonly heard in Tel Aviv caf\u00e9s. (When I visited the city in late 2007, I had a similar impression regarding the Russian language). My intention was to use the voices of the oldest living generation of immigrants, giving a historical perspective on the evolving social and ethnic composition of the city.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Language is central to the project. Interviews, each consisting of basic, rudimentary words and sayings, were conducted with representatives of various social\/ethnic groups in contemporary Tel Aviv. The variety of pronunciations ensured that the recordings would play the role of ‘shibboleths’, where the differences in pronunciation underscore the ethnicity of the speaker. As the concept of ‘shibboleth’ is about phonology, not semantics, it was suggested to the composers to use the phoneme, and not the word, as the main compositional nucleus, without narrowing their artistic freedom. The Turning Sounds Society, which I chair, devotes itself to crossover art forms between so called ‘high’ and ‘pop’ culture. Since 2006, one of its activities is the Mouth-o-Fonic current, devoted to uncommon shades of the human voice. It is intriguing how artists using the beatboxing technique – still a deeply underexploited artistic resource – see the objets sonores they produce as a development of the musical qualities of the phonemes. The \u00a0“If you speak it, it’s no legend” project attempts to approach the same sphere from another direction.<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0It is worth noting that the differences in pronunciation of any language in foreigners’ speech can be regarded as analogous to the differences between various dialects of a language. It is only through constructing an imagined generalized picture that we see language as one internally non-contradictive system. (It always makes me think when I hear fellow Poles speaking ‘incorrectly’).<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Antoni Beksiak, The Turning Sounds Society<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong>Press:\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/?p=491\">\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/?p=491\">Ayelet Dekel, If You Listen<\/a><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/?p=542\">Shlomit Sharbit, Social Sound Installation (in hebrew)<\/a><\/div>\n<p>—<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>“If you speak it -it is no legend”, 2006 Curators: Sala-manca & Antoni Beksiak Raw recording (short demo): “If you speak it -it is no legend” \u00a0is a sound installation consisting of four original pieces written by Israeli and Polish composers. The common base of these works is the use of the voices of non-Jewish … <a href=\"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/?p=549\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">“If you speak it -it is no legend”, 2006<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[160],"class_list":["post-549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-curatorial-practice","tag-antoni-beksiak"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":924,"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions\/924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.sala-manca.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}