Reading with the music

I recently came across a new work by Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, available in PDF form. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0194

But suppose I read the careful work and use its examples, would having the music make it easier? Take a simple two-syllable word, למה (lamah, why) sometimes accented on the first syllable, sometimes on the second. Why is this? This is a reasonably frequent word as you can imagine, as frequent as why is in English. It occurs in the Hebrew Bible 180 times in 171 verses, almost always glossed as why.

I see it is generally accented on the first syllable. In the 150 or so that I scanned I found just over a half-dozen with an accent on the second syllable alone, a similar number with accents (ornaments) on both syllables, and a few with maqaf (hyphen) allowing the accent to be postponed to the next word. (Hint when reading music, the pulse is the first note after the bar line. It always corresponds to an accented syllable. The bars are active until the next reciting note or 25 syllables whichever occurs first.)

The first time the word occurs is in Genesis 4:6.

Genesis 4:6 showing two instances of למה each with the common accentuation.
And Yahweh said to Cain,
Why is it for you to burn with anger, and why has your face fallen?

Genesis 18b-19a provides a pair of these words with one of them accented on the second syllable rather than the more common first.

Genesis 18b-19a two instances of למה with differing accentuation
Why did you not make clear to me that she is your wife? Why did you say she is my sister?

In Genesis 4:6 we see the word occurring on a C and on a g# as reciting note. I have seen it assigned to each one of the reciting notes, as one would expect, depending on the emotive quality required for the music.

1 Samuel 1:8 has 3 instances of the word, each differently set to music.

1 Samuel 1:8 - three instances of למה

Joshua 9:22 is an example of a why on a rest note, as if perhaps, the speaker is expressing quiet confidence.

Joshua 9:22 למה on the subdominant mid-verse rest
Why did you deceive us?

I see too from this PDF (page 195) that there is a third usage of the small vertical stroke, called a ga`ya,  that is indistinguishable in Unicode from silluq and metheg, further complicating the security of knowing (in an interpretive computer program) whether to return to the tonic mid-verse.

But, there is nothing explained in the PDF that is not rendered aptly by the music or that conflicts with the interpretation of the accents that I have promoted on this site. And I have promoted it largely because it has an ease of explanatory power that is unequaled in any other interpretation I have read, (admitting that my reading is limited, and I am quickly bored by an overly complex explanation).

The explanations in the referenced PDF are very clear perhaps because there is no attempt to systematize the lost music or wonder about sequences of accents. In fact, the writer acknowledges that there is a class of 'pitch' accents, implying that the Haïk-Vantoura schema is reasonable.

The passage then goes on to say that the arrangement (tartīb) of the accents may have been based on the practice of the Levites. This is most likely referring to the fixing of the sequence of different pitch accents in the musical cantillation. 

My emphasis.