Textual criticism and music

Tim raised for me in a comment the need for footnotes at least with the issue of textual criticism in mind. I found this paper by Ronald Hendel. It is quite an intro to Textual criticism. There are several examples in Genesis 1 that would change the music significantly, adding whole phrases (verse 9) and moving certain repeated refrains (like and it was so) to different locations. It is hard to imagine a quick summary and would take a longer post than I have time for at the moment.

If I had undertaken this kind of study (and with a teacher and with more direct access to manuscripts and the Qumran texts), my current work would probably never have been completed. The degree of footnoting required for such a 'translation' would be overwhelming to both reader and writer. (Even JB does not mention some of the variants.) But fascinating it is indeed and I highly recommend the article.

Perhaps I will do a phrase by phrase comparison of Gen 1 at some later time but it is not likely from this source. I see that there is no attention paid to accents at all. I am sure I could be taught, but there is not enough in this text for me to see what's what with the variants where they did include accents. "Masoretic accents are not included in the critical text because of the technical limitations of my computer software and the minimal pragmatic value of such variants (see Goshen-Gottstein 1965: 42)." P 115