Friday 23 May 2014

Pondering the music in the Decalogue

The use of the te'amim in Exodus 20, the 10 commandments, is quite different from every other section of Scripture that I have looked at so far. There is a great density of ornamentation, a frequent use of two reciting notes on one syllable, and equally frequent use of an ornament on a change of reciting note, creating an accented appoggiatura that gives unexpected character to the passage.

There are a number of questions that Suzanne Haik-Vantoura treats differently. If one has both a change of reciting note and an ornament on a syllable, which one takes precedence? She sounds the change of reciting note before the ornament. This may smooth things out, but it is not necessarily the only possible decision.

[programming troubles]
My program does some things now that I cannot easily explain! That is because I am dealing with the vaguaries of Hebrew transcription and syllabification into Latin characters concurrently with deciding the reciting note and the ornaments. Also I have to deal with the limits of my ability to hack out the computer programming in Oracle PL/SQL and the limits of the language of Music XML and the ways in which it interferes with itself in a particular XML reader. For instance the tag replaces a prior tag rather than interpreting both. And in Musescore this causes a confusion of tuples and slurs! So I have had to number these without going too high or the program crashes. Because Musescore does not adjust breath-marks correctly when copying, I have decided to replace the breath mark with a rest. That corrected the conflict, but upset my syllable counter! and also I noted that some recitations exceed my maximum bar length of 24 beats so giving a false reading of the maximum recitation length (sometimes). 24 beats is the width of two horses drawing a chariot - so I don't dare make the bar risk exceeding the page width.

If you ever use my XML transcriptions, be prepared to fix a few things manually. For instance yom is one syllable but if you add a change in reciting note and an ornament, I will interpret it as two syllables. [I do hope to fix this.] Sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish a mater from a vav as consonant. Especially when the character string is 28 characters long instead of the expected 14 (operating in extended html).
[end programming troubles]

I am impressed actually with the way the program handled this complexity. It only took 2 days to figure out which language processor (transcription, XML, Musescore, or me) was the trouble maker.

Now for the musical issues - there are so many. Here's the picture: the down arrows show where there are accented ornaments on a change in reciting note - highly unusual anywhere else in the 250 sections of Scripture I have looked in so far. The ovals show where I need to change the program to allow longer melismas on a single syllable. At present I have truncated melismas longer than a triplet (except for the qarne-talsha combination which has length of 6 notes). The pentagons show where two reciting notes are marked on a single syllable. Very rare in those 250 sections of music that I have seen so far. Verse 11 is like other passages. You can see I have included no special markings in the image.

Tell me what you think of these differences. If unique, this would surely represent a musical comment on the text. Full PDF with English underlay here. Another post on this subject is here.

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