Zarqa table for the 21 Books

I am happy that I haven't published much on my understanding of zarqa tables. A few days ago I began to hear, in my own history of learning to sing, that this aide memoire might be useful. In putting the first few tables together, I discovered just how many mistakes I can make -- pasting the wrong image, being unable to find the alt key sequence, getting the keyboards mixed up, getting the accents used in poetry and prose confused, and so on. a yet newer version of my accent table has been reposted here. It now includes the names in Hebrew, a column for the decimal value of the Unicode using the alt-number pad for entry, and alternative accent locations in the words to allow a little more flexibility.

So here's my first generic zarqa table for the 21 books.

Zarqa table for the 21 Books

We begin on the tonic, with silluq, the name of the accent that moves the reciting note to the tonic. Silluq is the default start position if no other accent is specified. All verses end on the tonic, so I have put silluq at the end of this sequence also.

I put darga into bar 1 after silluq so we can also sing the scale beginning on low c (darga). This is the lowest reciting note. Observe that the reciting note changes on the syllable that contains the accent. So the first syllable of darga is on the current reciting note e, and the second syllable containing the darga accent changes the reciting note to the c. The word tevir continues on the current reciting note and sets the recitation to d on its second syllable. The first bar above sings all the symbols below the text, each of which designates a particular reciting note.

In the bar 9 above are 8 ornaments in succession, all ornamenting the last defined reciting note, C. Again, the syllable that contains the ornamental accent above the text defines the musical motif that constitutes the ornament. The rest of the word is sung as in singing a verse, on the current reciting note.

The 9 accents in bars 10 and 11 ornament the reciting note A, set by the atnah. The final bar returns the reciting note to the tonic e and one more ornament. Seventeen ornaments altogether.

You can see that this is a very efficient and compact notation. It shows you the effect of two different concepts:

1. the reciting note defined consistently and exclusively by the signs below the text and

2. melismata consistently defined by the signs above the text that ornament the musical line around the current reciting note.

A zarqa table can be created for any verse. This would be like singing do-re-mi instead of the words of a song. I will post one in the next post.