In case you have forgotten

Passing the torch -- How to read the Bible with its music.

1. Sometime in the last 15 years before Covid-19,  Jonathan Wheeler gave me a DVD containing all of the work of Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura. Jonathan Wheeler was the editor of the English translation of her magnum opus: The Music of the Bible Revealed. The contents of the DVD are available on my Google Drive, and on OneDrive, and there is a copy in iCloud. One or more of these should work for you. If you have an interest and a place to keep such a collection, please feel free to download the files.
2. This blog, as long as it lasts, has since 2010 or so devoted many posts to learning, interpreting and exploring the music revealed by Haïk-Vantoura's deciphering key. Some of these posts have been very popular, so I know there is some interest. 
3. My final 'technical' project on the subject will be the preparation of the 18 volumes I am working on that display Haïk-Vantoura's work verse by verse. These volumes allow anyone to see and hear the Hebrew Bible in a form never available before. There are helps in the first volume on The Book of Job that were written for non-musicians and non-Hebrew students as well.

The project is over 80% completed. I prepared it for myself. This is what I want to read as support for learning Hebrew. 

When I have fully extracted the remaining books (the last few chapters of Judges, Samuel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles), I will begin to think again. I hope to write short summaries of the character of the music in each volume. I want to separate my work from my database (Oracle) and from custom software and ultimately from myself. 

The e-pub form of each volume is fully updatable by anyone competent in music tech and html/svg/css files as used in an e-pub. I will explain my process for updating a chapter in a separate post. The music files (.mscz) and rename files (.bat) for each chapter will be available from the publisher for each volume as it appears.

I hope there will be users who want to open the music files (use Musescore), update the music if there are errors in the Hebrew, and update the translation when required. Perhaps there will be users who want to develop an arrangement of the music. I'm still looking for the Bach who could make these verses sing. The whole is as clear as I can make it. I have acknowledged the technicians whose products I used in the Book of Job, the first available volume.

Regrettably, without the database, I cannot make it easy to update the concordance, but with luck, I may get one more stab at that process in the future. (There have been just 99 translation changes since the last updates of the 401 pages (11-2023) -- that's about 1 in 3000 verses, or .3%. But there have been over 3000 errors to date corrected in the WLC musical data based on a comparison to the Aleppo codex. About 10-30% of verses, depending on the chapter, have been affected by copying errors, omissions, and additions. I am sure I have not found them all. By concentrating on a known source of errors, extra silluqs, errors in silluq, and missing silluqs, I have restored the thrust of the vocal line to the earliest witness.) 

For further information and a brief reaction from another student of Hebrew cantillation, please see this post on linked in.