This is a summary with a simple example of what the work of Suzanne Haik Vantoura means to me. If you were going to write a book on this, which passages of Scripture would you include?
Let’s
begin with music. In the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and of the
earth.
Pitch
any of the music where it is comfortable for you. The opening is a major triad followed by the subdominant,
doh, mi, sol, la. Then descend a major third to re where your mode includes the
awkward augmented second from re to mi. Then back to re and back to doh. We
have even fewer notes than the doh-re-mi song in The Sound of Music.
That
is the first verse of Genesis.
What
class of music is this? How many differing phrases are there? What does it say
about the text? Does singing the text change its meaning?
There
are so many possible things to notice about the text and the music. Note that I
have put a caesura in this short phrase. A caesura is a pause. It means take a
rest and think about what you are in the middle of. In English, it reads: in
the beginning of God’s creating.
Pause.
In
the beginning of God’s creating what? Take up the tune again: the heavens and
the earth. This second half of the verse is the direct object of the first
half of the verse. We know that it is the direct object from the little word ‘eit’.
This word is spelt alef-taf. It is comprised of the first (א) and
last (ת) letters of the Hebrew consonant alphabet.
It signifies that the direct object of the verb follows. There are two direct
objects in the phrase, hashamayim, the heavens, and ha’arets, the
earth. To match the rhythm of the Hebrew, we might translate the phrase as; of both
the heavens and also the earth. But generally speaking, the direct object marker
את is not translated.
Why
didn’t I translate as usual: in the beginning, God created? There are a lot of
good reasons. In Hebrew, it is often the case that a word ending in ‘t’
indicates a special form of the noun that says ‘more to come’. In this case,
the single word bereshit, is ‘in the beginning of’, not just ‘in the beginning’.
There is a suggestion in the form of this gerund from the verb ‘to begin’ that
creation continues and that time is different from the time-line that we imagine. It is not as if God ‘created’ and then just let the clockwork happen.
Music
is more than a single note. Music gathers words into a single phrase that holds
the beginning in the end and makes time in a sense, stand still. We will have a
lot to say about the heavens and our earth, our land, even our own individual
piece of the ground which we know as body, a body with ears that can hear the
music it sings, a body with heart that can know the singer of the music, a body
with eyes that can process the information in the music, the text, and its
history.
So
bereshit is more than a distant big bang, and more than a distant act of
speech. It is also a continuing presence and a promising end.
The text
This
section is a bit more technical.
In
our typical Latin-based texts, we have 26 letters and punctuation. Our letters
are either vowels or consonants, a single letter (like Y or W) occasionally
acting as either. Our punctuation is indicated through fewer than a dozen marks,
comma, period, semicolon, colon, dashes, quotations, and so on. In the Hebrew
Scriptures, there are 22 consonants, a dozen or so vowels, and the
te’amim,
a set of 22 marks considered for the last 1000 years as punctuation. David
Mitchell
dubs them “punctuation on steroids”. These accents make considerably more sense
as music. Hebrew vowel sounds are indicated by dots and dashes under the
consonantal letters. Both vowels and
te’amim are under and over the letters
of the text, like this letter bet with an ‘a’ under it,
בָ pronounced
ba or va.
|
Letter
|
Rough
pronunciation
|
א
|
Alef
|
guttural or nothing
|
ב
|
Bet
|
b or v
|
ג
|
Gimel
|
g (hard)
|
ד
|
Daleth
|
d or th
|
ה
|
Heh
|
h
|
ו
|
Vav
|
וָ va וּ oo וֵ vei וֹ vo וִ vi וְ vɘ וֶveh וv
or
nothing
|
ז
|
Zayin
|
z
|
ח
|
Chet
|
ch
|
ט
|
Tet
|
t
|
י
|
Yod
|
y
|
ך כ
|
Kaf
|
k
|
|
Letter
|
Rough
pronunciation
|
ל
|
Lamed
|
l
|
ם מ
|
Mem
|
m
|
ן נ
|
Nun
|
n
|
ס
|
Samech
|
s
|
ע
|
Ayin
|
guttural deeper than alef
|
ף פ
|
Peh
|
p or f
|
ץ צ
|
Tsade
|
ts
|
ק
|
Qof
|
q
|
ר
|
Resh
|
r
|
שׁ
|
Shin
|
sh
|
שׂ
|
Sin
|
s
|
ת
|
Taf
|
t
|
The
te’amim, called marks of taste
,
like this mark,
בֽ, can be considered as disjunctive or conjunctive signs
like punctuation, but they are also of sufficient complexity taken together to
be hand signals or chironomy, signs indicating the movements of a conductor of
music.
The
te’amim consist of two overlapping sets of signs, one for the books of
truth
,
Psalms, Proverbs, and the speeches of Job, and one for all the rest of the
Hebrew Bible. For convenience, I will distinguish these two sets by the names
poetry
for the three, and
prose for the remainder.
The
first thing to note about the te’amim is that there are exactly eight
signs below the letters for the prose and seven for the poetry. What a musician
immediately notices is that these could be applied to a musical scale, the full
octave for the prose, and a modal scale for the poetry. The remaining signs,
with some duplication of those used below the text, all occur above the
letters. There are eleven in use for the prose and eight for the poetry. The
overlap between the sets is quite comprehensible to a musician. It is feasible
to learn to sight-read the music, much as a musician can sight-read tonic
sol-fa or a musical staff.
Here is the first set of marks, the
scale for the prose books as deciphered by Suzanne Haik-Vantoura (SHV).
ב֧ ב֤ ב֣ ב֑ ב֖ ב֥ בֽ ב֛
These she sets to
correspond (reading left to right) exactly to a tonic sol-fa scale with a
raised fifth. C D E F, G# A B C. Notice how close the poetry scale is: D# E F#
G A B C.
ב֤ ב֣ ב֑ ב֖ ב֥ בֽ ב֢
All
these pitches are relative to the tonic, the third note of the prose scale and
the second note of the poetry scale.
The tonic is signified by the
silluq ֽ under the letter. Readers of Hebrew will recognize
that this sign occurs at the end of every verse. Each set also comes to rest on
the A subdominant. Readers of Hebrew will recognize the sign,
֑ the atnah, as the primary disjunctive mark in many verses.
SHV
interpreted the set of signs that occur above the letters as ornaments relative
to the current pitch. The current pitch is determined by default as the tonic
until a sign is encountered that changes it. The current pitch remains current
until a new sign is encountered below the letters. The ornaments return to the
current pitch either on the current syllable or on the next syllable. The
determination is made based on placement of the sign and whether the pitch
changes on the next syllable.
Here are the ornaments for
the poetry books as they would be interpreted on a musical staff when the
current pitch is A. On the right is the full scale. The full set is available
here.
In
all the many examples developed by SHV, she says she has applied these notes
without
exception to decipher the music from the Hebrew text.
She recommends using the Max HaLevi Letteris edition (1896). Mitchell (2013)
points out that her bias is not justified in that she likely never saw the more
reliable Aleppo Codex. All the music in my recent posts has been derived from the Hebrew
text of the Westminster Leningrad codex (
www.tanach.us/Tanach.xml) and edited where
necessary and where available to agree with the Aleppo codex (
www.aleppocodex.org) or (in a very few cases)
the Letteris edition of 1946.
Back to the
Beginning
Now
that the technical part is dealt with, let’s put all the pieces together, the
original Hebrew text, the syllables transcribed into Latin characters, and the
musical signs for this first phrase of the Bible.
Music
is more than notes. This opening snippet of music gathers 18 syllables into two
phrases. The first word shows a change in reciting note on the third syllable. So
we move from E to G#, from doh to mi. The second syllable of the second word
shows a sign that moves us to sol (B). Then the first of this pair of phrases
has a rest point in the middle (fa, A) marked by the atnah (^) on the third
syllable of Elohim.
We
rest on God’s creating. Even in the middle of a thought, we rest.
The
fourth word, the single syllable direct object marker, shows that we move to F
(re). Then the third syllable of hashamayim, the heavens, moves us back
to G# (mi). The second syllable of the sixth word, the second direct object
marker, moves us back to F (re), and then we reach the tonic doh, again on the
silluq on the middle syllable of the seventh word.
So
we have a musical movement from tonic to subdominant in the first phrase. Each
stressed syllable follows the dashed bar line which always occurs at a change
in reciting note. Then a musical movement from the rest point back to the
tonic. Each phrase has three stresses and each leads to the end of the phrase
as one would expect of music.
