Psalms 2, the music

[This post has been updated for clarity and tone.] How does a non-musician read music. Non-musicians generally don't read music. But even without an ear, a non-musician can learn to see if a verse is not beginning on the tonic. And with an ear, and a performance, the connection is even more obvious.

One thesis I have about the music is that when a verse (or chapter) (or book) does not begin as is normally expected on the default tonic reciting note, this is more often than not a clue that the verse may be related to what has gone before. The exegete must decide what the reference is. The thesis is illustrated by hosts of examples. (There are also examples where I think that the use or non-use of the opening note on the tonic depends only on whether the note is an upbeat or not. There are many ways in which music shapes the form of a text.) I have found, however, many examples in the verses that I have examined or arranged where connection is a more satisfying 'explanation' of an opening note that is not the tonic.

It is more unusual for a whole chapter or book to begin on a note other than the tonic. Psalms 2 begins on a g - not the tonic. I suspect this is because it is related to Psalms 1. We can confirm this by word usage. See previous post. I continue my analysis of Psalms 2 and its music below.

In Job, the narrator's part is carefully arranged such that the response is paired musically with the introduction to the speech it is responding to. Job is a unique book in that it uses both sets of te'amim, those of the 3 poetry books, and those of the 21 prose books. Chapters 1, 2, 42, and the narrator's voice throughout use the prose accents. All the speeches use the poetic accents. 

The narrator's parts uses the prose accents, while the rest of the chapter uses the poetry accents. These narrator's paired verses are always connected to each other by the music. The second verse in each cycle of speeches is connected to the first verse in the cycle through the technique of beginning on the mediant rather than the tonic. So even one verse as part of a chapter, a full chapter or more from the opening verse of the paired speeches begins with an accent that reaches aurally back to the opening music.

Also in Job, the opening verse starts with an ornament and then mimics Genesis 1:1. I think this verse signals that the book is going to take on a simplistic reading of Moses.

Musical language.

The images below are from my book, The Song in the Night, According to the Melody in the Accents of the Hebrew Text.

Musical language for the notes of a scale, e, f, g, A, B, C, D, E

The seventh and the octave above are reached only by ornamentation. They are never used as reciting notes. 

The accents that correspond to the first 6 notes are silluq, merkha, tifha, atnah, munah, mahpakh. A seventh sublinear sign in the poetry books, galgal, corresponds to d# just below the tonic e. In the prose books (and those bits of Job mentioned above), the reciting notes are c d e f, g# A B C. The prose notes that are not in the poetry scale are darga (step, low c) and tevir (broken, low d instead of galgal). 

The prose scale begins on the submediant below the tonic where in some sense its name seems to say it belongs. On wonders it the subdominant should also be there and if the music might map to a nine note scale from low a through high A. This appears to be a form of tuning for some nine note stringed instruments. (See figure 5 in the article by Richard Dumbrill here.) I doubt that the scale for the Bible is nine notes. I suspect the heptatonic scale had taken over for the human voice. 

The explanatory language of musical notes, intervals, and shape is easier to hear for English speakers than the Hebrew names for the accents. It also allows us to 'look' at the music.

For Psalms 2, the whole PDF is at the link, but the following will make more sense if I put in pictures.

The opening note is g (the mediant, the third note of the scale, tifha).

Opening of verse 1.

In this psalm, the opening note of several verses is not the tonic e. Verse 2 begins on the supertonic (f, second note of the scale, merkha, f# in the mode we are using).

So verse 2 is connected to verse 1.

Verse 3 again begins on the mediant (g).

So verse 3 is connected to verse 2.

Verse 4 is the first verse to begin on the tonic (e). 

Verse 4 begins a new group of verses.

I suspect the syntactical diagram of the text will concur with the music. See this post for the text with a translation.

Verse 5 begins on a high C, (the submediant).  

Verse 5 is strongly tied to verse 4 in the conversation.

Verse 6 begins again on the mediant (g). 

Verse 6 continues verse 5.

Verse 7 shows its relative independence from the prior verses by beginning on the tonic. Verse 7 is also the only tricolon. Note how the ole-veyored is a pause on the supertonic. And the atnah, a cadence on the subdominant. 

Verse 7 - the only tricolon in Psalms 2.

And so on. Verse 8 begins on the tonic. Verse 9 continues verse 8. Verse 10 continues verse 9. Verses 11 and 12 both begin on the tonic. They may be paired as a strophe. 

This psalm is a surprise to me, looking at the music in this detail. I do not recall offhand other psalms having quite so many strophes defined by the sense of continuity built into the music using the first note of a verse. 

There are other musical ways of defining strophes. And I hope to continue pointing out examples. I am confident that the music, whatever its form, will provide or question prosodic decisions made with other semantic or syntactic techniques. It sure makes counting syllables easier.

I do not have a performance or a special setting available of Psalms 2. Perhaps you can hum through it yourself. The prosody suggested by the music is dramatically sound. Perhaps one could fund a local composer to arrange it. I was thinking that one might assign verse 7 uniquely to a trio singing in homophonic close harmony around the given cantus firmus.

P.S. You may have noted that Psalms 1 begins on an f#! What then is it related to? I think it is a commentary on everything that went before. This makes David's Torah a significant key to hearing Moses and making sense of all this instruction to do it. 

(Aside: many people from William Wickes to James Kugel have found fault with the te'amim. Wickes says he has to correct them, and Kugel says they conflict with parallelism. I concur with some corrections particularly with the Unicode confusion of ga'ya, metheg, and silluq, but there is no conflict with recurrence or parallelism in the music that I have found. It is true that they should be subject to the same textual criticism as any other part of the manuscript, and that there are many variations and traditions other than those beginning with the Aleppo codex, and that no one is very sure where the hand-signals came from. These are other stories. I have worked with the musical mapping illustrated here for 15 years and without it, I would still be baffled by these diacritics.)