A brief on Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura

I have not personally met Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura. I know her only through her discovery, her book in translation, her manuscripts, and her voice on National Public Radio. Her book, in English and in French, is generally available on the web in portable document format. She strikes me as a scientist, someone with considerable interest in the Hebrew text whose experimentation led them to a repeatable discovery and to a discovery that would uncover additional confirmatory theorems.

You can find opinions online. The paragraph in Wikipedia may well be accurate but the musicologists' negative assessment of her work seems to me to speak more about musicologists than her work.

Psalm 105 verses 1 and 2 introduce the English translation of her book.

You can see from the score above that she uses a non-standard notation. The white notes identify the syllable that the accent appears on, but their whiteness says nothing about duration.

How did she get to her deciphering of the musical sense of these signs? In her own words:

Procédant par étapes, avec de constants retour en arrière dans la pénombre de l'incertain, avec des lueurs de probabilité se rejoignant parfois en indices, je suis parvenue à ébaucher, puis à étayer grâce à une inlassable expérimentation, le processus d'une Clé logique de déchiffrement de la notation mésestimée. Une Clé jamais effleurée, exempte du moindre empirisme, témoignant que cette notation est bien l'acte conscient de musiciens éprouvés.

Appliquée avec le même bonheur à d'innombrables versets, elle fait jaillir de ces signes - en fait incompris - une musique véritable, venue du cœur; une musique qui incite à l'admiration, l'enthousiasme, autant qu'à la réflexion intime et philosophique. Et cette musique, d'un art achevé malgré sa simplicité exemplaire, revendique une antiquité fort lointaine, de par sa structure même.

As translated by Dennis Weber:

Proceeding step by step, with constant returns into the penumbra of the unknown, with occasional glimmers of probability encountered in the clues offered — I was able to outline, then support by inexhaustible experimentation, the basis for a logical deciphering key for this misunderstood notation. The results are devoid of the slightest guesswork and testify that this notation is truly the conscious act of master musicians.

Applied with equal ease to innumerable verses, the deciphering key makes real, authentic music burst forth from these heretofore incomprehensible signs. This is music which is heartfelt, inciting our admiration, enthusiasm, and intimate, philosophical reflection as well. This music, artistically fully developed despite its exemplary simplicity, demands an origin in far distant antiquity by reason of its very construction. (The music of the Bible Revealed, Foreword, page 5).

Her deciphering key both makes sense and applies without adjustments or guesswork to every verse in the Bible. At the same time, there will be variations in performance and interpretation of ornaments and accidentals. It is the prerogative of every performer to present the music, and such things are variable rather than fixed. I have no doubt, given the state of the text and the confusion that has reigned in the interpretation of these signs over the last 1000 years, that she worked through tireless experimentation to substantiate her key to this underestimated notation.

It is indeed a key that does not require any tweaking for a particular verse. If anything, the key helps identify errors in copying of the verse. It is more than a remarkable discovery. It profoundly changes the visual to the aural as a means of interpretation. It is not so much that we ‘see’ to understand, but that we hear. This allows for an empathy in us that is often missing from our traditions with respect to the holy text.

Her approach marks her as alert and determined, working from the information presented, and discovering its patterns. She draws more out of the data than anyone preceding her. I concur with her comments that the code was not invented when it appeared in the 9th century CE. If it had been, then the originators would have been able to explain it and it is clear that they could not.

I have demonstrated in these pages example by example the relationships between verses that the music brings out. She concludes her introduction with the comment: Il n’est que de l’écouter pour s’en persuader. One has only to hear it to be persuaded. She draws out of the data more information than anyone preceding her. What was it that she drew out? Her first observation is that there are signs both below and above the text. Her second observation is that there are always signs below the text and sometimes no signs above the text. Her claim is that the signs below the text are a scale. They specify a note on which the current text is to be sung.

Which notes? She observed that nearly every verse ends with the silluq as we have already seen. She reasoned from this to the caesura in the text itself. She observed that the caesura is frequently preceded by the combination of signs munach followed by atnah. She tested the assumption that a half-cadence at the caesura would work. That meant that these signs were supporting a move from the fifth to the fourth notes above the final note. She therefore placed the tonic on the third note of the C major scale, /e/.

Her research is described in great detail in her book, and the conclusions she comes to are compelling. I have tried alternative mappings such as reversing the fourth and fifth notes, but my results did not convince me. The subdominant matches the name for the sign, resting, atnah from the Hebrew נוה. The direct relationship of all the signs below the text to our musical staff is as follows.

Mapping the signs to a diatonic scale

I would go so far as to say that the likelihood of these accents turning into a musical score, if this was not intended by the people who designed them, is near zero. The likelihood that having uncovered this score, and it is not pointing us in the right direction is equally near zero. The proof is in the appropriateness and revealed structures of the music that is now available to us. She more or less makes a similar claim:

Jusqu’ici, les signes de cantilation de la Bible Hébraïque n’avaient reçu que les interpretations aussi diverses qu’évaisives. Voici que, du décryptage systématique de cette notation, surgit une musique qui reéclame l’attention, étant donné sa vie incontestable. (ibid Page 30).

Until the present, the cantillation signs of the Hebrew Scripture have been given interpretations as diverse as they were evasive. Now thanks to the systematic deciphering of this notation, a real music arises which demands our attention, in view of its unquestionable life.

I have been living with this unquestionable life in the past 14 years since I first heard of this score at the conference on the psalms convened by Susan Gillingham in Oxford in 2010. The theory I present in these pages was first presented to me there by David Mitchell, Director of Music, The Church of the Holy Trinity, Brussels.

Simply put, Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura uses more information implicit in the data than anyone else before her. I have looked at thousands of verses. Nowhere does the music interfere. In all cases, it elucidates. It never obscures other favoured tools for analysis like parallelism or word recurrence, or chiastic structures. It helps with interpretation and discovery of literary forms, like stanzas in the psalms.

The principle of Ockham's razor can be applied: it is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer symbols, and the best explanation is one that explains more of the usage of the patterns of the symbols.

I choose not to spend any more time rehearsing the interpretive confusion over the last 1000 years. I did this in my previous book on the subject, The Song in the Night. The standard teaching on the accents has been admirably summarized and accurately documented by Beth E. Owen. My only concern for Dr. Owen is that she might believe that what she has so clearly documented might be the best explanation. Suffice it to say that she summarizes even Wickes with clarity.

But the best explanation of the data is the one that uses the information in the design of the symbols as they are used. See this post for the concept of best explanation according to the principles of Bayes theorem. The only explanation that uses the consistent over the text and under the text separation is that of Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura.

Wickes insists that the accents have no effects outside the boundaries of a verse. This claim is demonstrably false on every page of Scripture. The accents are part of a musical composition. In prose, musical phrases show connectivity frequently. In poetry the shape of the use of the accents often defines the stanza structure of a poem. Every part of a musical composition is needed for its completion.

Also, no accent is subordinate to any other except the ornaments which require a reciting note to determine their pitch. This makes it subordinate to up to eight different accents below the text – a wholly different idea from the militaristic formation of hierarchies of accents. Notes and ornaments are all part of the whole and all needed by the whole, not as a slave needs its master, but as a melody needs all its parts to be complete.

As I compare Beth Owen’s style with that of Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura, I am struck by the fact that Owen follows scholarly citation rules. On the other hand, Haïk-Vantoura’s early opinions on the musical modes and ornaments come across as subjective. They are not anchored to other works in the same subject area. Owen’s work is meticulous and complete—at least on a first (and second) scan. Nonetheless, I have found Haïk-Vantoura's deciphering key to elucidate wonderful music, and though Owen is clear for which I am very grateful, but the rules she documents so well do not produce music or elucidate musical structure or restore tone of voice. These things are restored by a correct understanding of the accents and their melodic usage.

Citations in the above introduction:

• MacDonald, Bob. 2016. The Song in the Night, According to the Melody in the Accents of the Hebrew Text (Energion).
• Owen, Beth. "To Speak - To Listen: To Write - To Read: To Sing: The Interplay of Orality and Literacy in Hebrew Torah Cantillation ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu162068228714457
• Wickes, William. 1881, 1887. 1970. Two treatises on the accentuation of the Old Testament. Ed. Orlinsky, with a prolegomenon by Aron Dotan.
• Haïk-Vantoura, Suzanne. 1991. The Music of the Bible Revealed, https://shirhashirim.org.il/files/MBR%20English%20Book.pdf
• Wheeler, John, For several things that were on the web in the past. https://web.archive.org/web/20160725190629/http://www.rakkav.com/biblemusic/index.htm