What can be said about the accents in the psalms and their roles now that we have seen every psalm presented in its musical form.
- There must be and is usually one accent for every word. There may be more than one.
- Each accent may have more than one role: to define a pitch or an ornament, and to show which syllable of a word is stressed.
- In some contexts three accents define a cadence. Silluq at the end of a verse, atnah within the verse, and merkha when preceded by ole prior to the atnah.
א֖ל נקמ֣ות הופֽיע
The tonic: The opening recitation pitch is not specified. It defaults to the tonic (e is chosen for convenience of singing - all other pitches become relative to e).
The supertonic: The first word (two words connected by a maqqef are one) has one accent: the merkha מ֥. On that syllable, the recitation pitch becomes f#. The merkha plays both roles in this word: it shows the stress and the reciting pitch. Merkha is the second note of the scale, the supertonic.
The atnah: The second word is the divine name, a two syllable word, in this case with the accent, atnah, on the second syllable ו֑. The atnah (also called etnachta) is the fourth note of the scale, the subdominant, A. (I capitalize the notes in the upper octave and use lower case for those in the lower octave, like this c,d,e,f,g,A,B,C. The lower c does not occur in the poetry.)
The atnah defines a cadence within a verse. It marks the caesura in a large majority of the verses. In the psalms, it is in 2,335 verses, never more than once - (with the exception of the missing verse in psalm 145 which I have appended to verse 13 to avoid renumbering.) The atnah also show the stressed syllable in this word. The atnah does not divide a verse into equal parts. It does invite time to reflect on the sense of the verse.
The mediant: After the caesura, marked in the text by a line feed, in the next two letter word of this verse, the accent is the tifha (א֖). The recitation pitch moves to g, the third degree of the scale. To distinguish the tifha g, I see it as a curved forward slash (in right to left thinking) and the merkha f# (מ֥) as a curved backslash.
There is no maqqef (־) here though the letters are identical to the first line. Hyphens in Hebrew have nothing to do with spelling. They are part of determining where the stress is in a phrase, i.e. the movement of the musical line.
The dominant: The fourth word has a munah (מ֣) on the second syllable. It is the stressed syllable and the recitation pitch moves to the dominant, the fifth note of the scale, B.
The silluq: The fifth and last word has a silluq (פֽ) on the second syllable. This marks the cadence on the tonic. This short stroke under the text is the source of much confusion and miscopying of the text. The very same sign is used for a purpose related to long and short vowels. In this role it is called a meteg and should be ignored within the verse if that is what it is. As far as I can see, the meteg is rare in the psalms. I don't know any hard and fast rules for determining if the sign is a meteg. Musically it is fine for the e to play a role in the melody. But if we get nothing but e's in a verse, I become suspicious that the sign is out of place.
There are no signs above the text in this verse so the result is as you will find in this post. Have a look and sing it. (And while you are looking make sure I said things above accurately.)
The accents are well defined and their significance for the melody does not change when other accents precede or follow them. The design is consistent and predictable without the need to read ahead.
The design never interferes with parallelism, or any other poetical aspect of the text. The music carries the words and is subject to them and helps interpret their sense and tone.
The accents do not tell us absolute pitch. Sing where it is comfortable. They don't seem differentiated enough to determine the mode, i.e. to say what notes of the scale should be sharpened. They don't tell us about microtones or tuning or modulation.
No comments:
Post a Comment