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Sunday, 12 August 2012

My easy cheat-sheet for the te-amim


This is a really quick summary of the basic scales and ornamentation of the te'amim as far as I understand it so far. What remains subject to non-specific textual elements are things like rhythm and mode - i.e. which notes might or might not have accidentals.  

You can see at a glance that the prose ornamentation is more elaborate than the poetic, even for the same sign. This morning, after reading the lesson in English, I sang the last verse of 2 Samuel 18. David's lament over Absalom is prose. Yesterday's version used the poetic ornaments. In performance I corrected them to prose ornaments.

Prose applies to all Biblical books except Psalms, Proverbs, and the speeches of Job, all of which use the poetic markings.  I think the names are troublesome for there is much more poetry in the Bible than in these three books.  Perhaps the names should be the elaborate and the sparse

update: I added the numbers above to enable typing these symbols in extended html - so e.g. the Beth with a squiggle on it is this ampersand, #, 1489, ; ampersand, #, 1454, (or 1432) and it looks like this: ב֮ or ב֘ depending where you want the squiggle. Note 1450 is missing - discovered in the last stages of testing a program to draft the music automatically (unicode to xml translation).
update: I added the shortest names I could find so these can be referred to in text. Note that the tifha provides a cadence after an oleh - called oleh ve-yered, rising and falling.

Pashta is the prose version of qadma. They have differing placement. ב֙ ב֨ I will replace this eventually with a table reconciling the coding and the text of Wickes (1881, 87).

References:

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