A few examples of tsinnor and tsinnorit

Tsinnorit is a new name for an accent to me. I have always found the usage of the accent names inconsistent in all the books I have read (or seen and not read). The name is probably in some of the books I have looked at but I may not have noted it. Nonetheless, confusion or not, there is a pattern here, and it may lead to some insight into the mind of the ancient designer. Definitely the sign  ֮seen above as a sideways s often leads to a particular note. (But its not quite that simple).

Here's a collection of tsinnorit resolving to the supertonic.

Job 20:27 - tsinnorit (on the recitation pitch A) to mercha (f# in the poetry mode -- bars 29-30) preceding the final cadence on the tonic e

Psalms 118:25 - tsinnorit to f# twice: first from the reciting note on the third of the scale (bar 148) and before the subdominant A and again from reciting note f# before the final cadence on e

I see 17 additional examples in the poetry and that's all for the sequence tsinnorit-mercha. Mercha occurs independently also. The ornament preceding the f# may come on the reciting pitch A, g, or f# as seen above, and also on e and even from C (once) as in the following image.

Psalms 72:3 - shalshelet (bar 13) lifts up to tsinnorit on the reciting note C
before the subdominant (bar 15)

The following is an example of tsinnorit joined to the high C. This combination occurs 168 times in my data at present. and the sequence is often tsinnorit followed by C at the beginning of the verse. I had noticed these in previous years (even when I was following Unicode and miscalling it zarqa) because this ornament is often a help to the singer to get to the high note.

Proverbs 8:29 - getting to the high note by way of a tsinnorit.

There are 12 other instances in the poetry of tsinnor (not tsinnorit) preceding f#. There are 180 examples of tsinnor preceding d (galgal), 31 examples preceding e, and 22 preceding C, see Psalms 49:15 below. 

Psalms 49:15 containing both tsinnor and tsinnorit prior to C (mahpakh)

These are clearly different in WLC and its font. Not so clear in mgketer. There are an additional 22 instances of tsinnor with mahpakh following. I don't think the music is significantly different to try to verify these details. Here are the two in copy and paste form -- just highlighting the different placements over the letters.
mgketer.org  שַׁתּוּ֮  וַיִּרְדּ֮וּ 

tanach.us   שַׁתּוּ֮  וַיִּרְדּ֘וּ 

Anyway: I can see that this turn wherever it is placed on the letter often immediately precedes mahpakh which Haïk-Vantoura deciphers as the 6th above the tonic, C in her renderings of the pitches. It makes musical sense no matter which turn is sung. And the similar turn called zarqa and tsinnor may also resolve to d or e in the poetry books.

One more example.

Psalms 16:11 tsinnor preceding C (bar 64)

In the prose, I find 34 tsinnor resolving to e, 563 resolving to B, and 2 resolving to g (both in the 10 words -- special cases). Others may be followed by another ornament. I didn't find any leading to C or f.

It's hard to describe music this way, but one does ask why the designers of this system did not find easier ways to represent these hand signals. Maybe that's the clue -- music notation had not been invented, and the notation we have is limited to what the hands could signify. 

All this sort of detail is not my intent but I am glad I have been forced to pay a little more attention to it. My intent is limited to presentation -- so that the history of the Hebrew Bible that we have may be seen and heard in a musical form that is consistent with what could have been known at the time.

Learning the data - zarqa and legarmeh

The Hebrew Bible is not an easy task to learn for a non-Hebrew speaker who was not raised in the Hebrew tradition. This is not my 'excuse'. But it is important to know. Because there is a tendency that English readers have to think we know what is there in the Bible even in our ignorance, and when you think you know already, it certainly inhibits learning. (The risk is there for everyone.)

I have checked out all the so-called zarqa accents in the prose books in the Leningrad codex. It turns out that there should not be any. The accent called zarqa does not occur in the prose books in mgketer.org. I corrected all of them to tsinnor. It's a minor change in the melody using Haïk-Vantoura's deciphering key but it does reinforce the separation of the two sets of accents a little more. (Alas, if we eliminate zarqa, what becomes of the zarqa table!)

I have also experimented with inserting the legarmeh into the text in Calibre. Hebrew typing has many problems in that environment. I could define three bugs at least -- can't type inline, can't use the onscreen keyboard, and there are some problems with marking the text and pasting when words are connected by a makaf. I have workarounds. But legarmeh is ignored in the SHV deciphering key. I think of it as an editorial suggestion of a pause -- maybe in some cases a pause of a few billion years of imaginary time. I could illustrate this with Genesis.

Legarmeh in Genesis 2.
Let the performer add an editorial tick where there is a dramatic separation.

I may will include the changes in the 2065 verses that contain legarmeh over 700 or more chapters (in the WLC). I am generating the table entries that could be pasted into the html without error. Also I am generating the html files for the chapters affected. (It only takes about an hour to generate them all from the database. Putting them into the EPUB automatically merges them with the SVG images -- so maybe it is worthwhile doing and would not require too much of my spare time.) These are all support files for the EPUB along with the music files. Legarmeh must be considered musical because music includes the space between the notes. That could be the subject of a book-length treatise. I remember learning rhythm, pulse and agogic both as a young performer and as a middle-aged conductor. 

And legarmeh is also seen as contextual for some other accents. I understand that sequences can be contextual, but how much context, how much read-ahead, how many sequences of accents are there that would have such an effect? And why would anyone have developed a musical notation in this way? I don't know. The appeal of the SHV deciphering key is that it is immediately transparent to a musician. It is her thesis that there are no accents that require the reader to change their mind after reading the next accent. Appeals to context are obvious from the musical line. Nonetheless, legarmeh could be a useful sign and I should probably not have omitted it in the section of my tables with consonants and cantillation accents only. [adding it I will as I write a little about each volume -- the more I see it the better I like it -- Legarmeh is like Talmud in a stroke -- I could use some proof readers if anyone is interested... not that I'm expecting much for nothing but love.]