Terminology and cantillation

Anyone studying the te'amim, those accents in the Hebrew Bible, has many hurdles to get through before analysis can be done. I am currently reading Hebrew Psalmody, A structural investigation, by Richard Flender. 

This is scholarly - the first few hurdles with this book are that I need to be able to read medieval Hebrew, German, Arabic, Latin, French, music of course, and a few others things I have't yet noted, to get onto the pages. It is written in English for the most part.

Hurdles

But one hurdle in all these books of the old school is the number of holes in the pitch that you are running on as you manage the jumps you must make without breaking an ankle -- and don't knock down the first or last hurdle or you will be disqualified. 

The main trouble is the starting point, the terminology of conjunctive and disjunctive accents. I want to smooth out the problem. One must not start with terminology that fails in its application because it does not apply to music.

Music is neither disjunct or conjunct. Even music written for the setting of a limited amount of text is a continuous line of sound, silence, pitch and rhythm that expresses a thought aurally in a musical phrase. The sound and the silence are part of the musical phrase. The music is the space between the notes as Debussy taught us. But forget the idea of punctuation. It's the expressive recitation that counts. Even when describing a musical phrase, disjunct and conjunct are rarely used (never is more accurate in my experience). What comes to my mind is the opening of the fifth symphony. Is there a disjunction on the fourth note? Does that note always cause the music to become disjoint?

I am only describing to date my frustration at the insistence on 'rules and exceptions to a language' that does not describe music. Conjunct, disjunct, and dichotomy are terms in a language that has proven that it cannot do the job we need done. I'll post on what I find as helpful as I run the race that is set before me.

Definitions and observations

On first glance, I think Flender has written a good book. It approaches the problem of the history from text to music, and from music to text. He helpfully points out the generic genre of the music, whatever it is: the music is defined for the recitation of a canonical text. It is not a generalized music framework for free composition. But remember this: a pause in the Biblical music is either a cadence or a place for a breath.

A cadence is a point where the music as vibration of the air causes an internal thought in the hearer that there is a resting point or waiting station, if there is an ear or touch in the hearer that is receptive. There are three such cadences in the music of the psalms, 

1. the atnah which cadences on the subdominant, 
2. and the ole veyored, which cadences on the supertonic, (ole + merkha)
3. and the silluq, which cadences at the end of each verse.

Note that the silluq is also used within a verse sometimes and is just part of the musical phrase. If it appears in the middle of a verse, it is not a cadence. So even the strongest feeling of coming home to the tonic can be just a note in a musical phrase. Similarly the merkha is simply a note in the phrase sometimes. In some cases accents are not even accented. 

A place for a breath does not cause the musical line to suggest the tonal vibrations of a cadence. It is simply part of the expression of the music and a necessity for the performer. This can be accomplished with almost any accent, but revia in the poetry can be used as a breathing place, but not always.

Rules

I'm short on rules at present but here are a few that are without dispute:

• Silluq in the middle of a verse is rarer in the earliest text than it is in later ones for reasons I have stated in earlier posts. In the middle of a verse, silluq has no cadential role, nor does it require a pause. 
• We need to define what we mean by a word and the rule that there is at least one accent per word. 
• A word is a set of syllables connected together in a lexical unit without spaces. Such a unit may include maqqef (hyphen). In the scores of the music I produce, I have not included the hyphen so some 'words' may be without an accent. 
• A lexical rule is that each lexical word must have at least one accent. A word may have more than one accent.
• Atnah, the subdominant, may occur in a verse or may not. If atnah occurs in a verse, it occurs only once. 
• Ole veyored, the special approach to merkha, the supertonic, may occur in a verse of the poetry books. If ole veyored occurs, it occurs only once.
• If ole veyored occurs with atnah, it always occurs before atnah.
• the poetry combination of revia-mugrash may occur in a verse. If revia-mugrash occurs, it occurs after any existing cadence within the verse, i.e. after the atnah if it exists, and after the ole-veyored if it exists. If used, it is preparation for the final cadence on the tonic.
• A verse always ends with a silluq.

There are no instances that break these rules in any verse.

[A few weeks later I was returning this book to the library and I read a statement in the book that I could test, so I didn't return it. He states on page 88 that the sequence tsinnor-galgal-ole-veyored is fixed. I have no idea what he means by fixed. I presumed it meant what he then says that this is a rule of composition to warn the singer that an ole is coming when tsinnor is encountered. But it is simply false. ole occurs many times without this sequence.]

Consequences

But how do rules operate and what are the consequences. Here's one: I could never have scanned a score to find errors in one codex and then verify it in another codex without the Haïk-Vantoura deciphering key.

Flender writes on page 21 that "The speech, that is, the pronunciation and intonation of Hebrew texts, was permanently fixed through the punctuation and accentuation." To be fair, this in in the context of what the Masoretes were trying to accomplish and as far as it goes it is descriptive.

But do you hear what it supposes? The sentence supposes that music is a temporal sequence of phonemes and sounds proceeding forward in time. Music is more than forward in time. How often on these pages have I shown that beginning a verse on a note other than the tonic acts like a rear-view mirror. This is not forward in time. Music transcends time and in performance subtends an experience that gathers unexpected referents together especially joining the verse(s) to what has gone before.

There are other consequences that I have noted elsewhere: restoration of the tone of voice, characteristics of each recitation tone beyond the vague idea of low medium and high. We remain in the search for further consequences and clarifications.