Swan has returned from the deep south

We travelled 5000 miles to the south mostly by ship -- so a long journey without blogging.

I continue to work on the Music of the Bible. I think it will take years, even generations, for the intriguing usage of the te'amim to be appreciated. They are music, yes, but how did the ancient cantors / composers use the tool that we have now deciphered for anyone who chooses to look and hear?

My work as far as it continues is concentrating on melodic motifs and their recurrences. Do these identify deliberate relationships between texts? I think so -- but now I must search to measure how the music is used to do this. It is easy to search with the accents deciphered. 

There was an example in my last post from Feb 9th before our long journey that stimulated some work on the use of the opening triad.

Job 36:6-7 Two verses beginning with an opening triad (silluq-tifha-munach) followed by the subdominant (atnah)

On my holiday I looked at about 50 verses with this opening shape. The results were fascinating.

1073 verses begin with e g B A. That’s about 4%. About 2% more contain the motif (perhaps). Only two books begin with the motif. Genesis and Esther. Job mimics this motif in its first verse. No other first verses of books contain the triad. Essentially this is equivalent to the statement that the sequence silluq tifha munach atnah says something about creation. And look at what we have above, 2 verses with that shape, and they are about the created order.

As I looked, I found some were clear to classify tentatively, others not yet fitting. I have to take care not to name a motif before I have enough information. But 1500 verses would exceed a comfortable blog post, not to mention my analytical capacity. Yes, one could ask a bot, but piano, piano, as they say.

Still, the opening of Esther using the same musical gesture is interesting because Esther also begins with cosmic scale: the empire, the extent of the kingdom, the ordering of the court. It is a political "creation scene." The same musical opening may therefore function as a macro-introduction to a world being set up. How much is our governance a random farce (with consequences) ruled by men 'who should know better'? 

Then I thought of the poignancy and comfort of Isaiah 12 -- a different motif. Haïk-Vantoura's default setting gives a haunting quality to verse 3:

Isaiah 12:3 Antiphon for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost

So I considered whether this was another recognizable and distinguishable leitmotif. Notice the pause -- critical space for consideration of the support of the human creature.

Do not accept a translation or read Isaiah 12:3 like this: With joy you shall draw water from the wells of salvation. This pulse misses the mid point rest -- the subdominant. No translation should ever treat a 1-4-1 phrase without the mid verse pause, and as far as possible, the translation should respect the word on which the pause is placed and its relative distance from the beginning of the verse. (Compromise is clearly needed as illustrated in Job 38 above. The parallel in Hebrew leads with the verb, not the subject, but I let the translation compromise the placement of words on the reciting tones.)

The subdominant rest  occurs in Hebrew on the word joy -- so we must observe it. Joy is fundamental to the human need and raison d'etre. When sung according to its accentual structure, this verse is immediately grasped and retained by a congregation without instruction. They don't need to 'know' that it's an atnah or a subdominant. They retain it because it feels right. (I have 6 years of evidence for this claim. One of my congregations has used this setting 3 times when the passage is used as a psalm. The fact of such appropriate aural memory is among the strongest supports for Haïk-Vantoura's deciphering key. The key is confirmed by the words and the music teaches us how to read the words even if we cannot sing.)

Sure enough, as I looked through several chapters of Genesis, this same motif leading to the subdominant was used sparingly and with verses that support a semantic claim of sustained assurance. See if you agree that these are verses recognizing and supporting the life of a human:  

• Genesis 2:24, 3:24, unity, exclusion -- into an ordered world,
• Genesis 6:22, 7:5, 8:7,18, 9:13, obedience, preservation, covenant,
• Genesis 13:5, 14:3,16,19, growth, recovery, blessing,
• Genesis 15:6-7, faith, alignment within the promise.  

There are more, but the whole cannot be attacked at once. I hope to have Genesis out this quarter.

I think you might agree that these are key points in the text where the support of the human is explicit. One must ask also -- why this and why not in places where the sequence of accents is not used? Too many questions for one researcher. That's why I must publish so that others can hear (and for the musically untrained, see) the differences this makes even on the reading surface.

These verses are among the 4000 or so that do not rise to the announcement pitch of the munach (dominant). There is no tension to release in them, just assurance to be enjoyed.