Accents under the text repeated in a single word

Yesterday's post proved prophetic. After completing over 80% of the Bible and manipulating and deleting about 50,000 images -- that's a guess but probably not far off the mark -- I had to correct some bits and pieces in the psalms. It's not very easy. RTL processing is minimally supported in Musescore as in a lot of other word processors. And correcting the te'amim is not well supported with the keyboard or onscreen keyboards I have.

Anyway - it's possible and only confusing because I had several books and directories and pages and other apps open on my desktop at once. A test of my nearly 80 year old short term memory.

I found in Judges two verses that had doubled silluq under the same word. This produces a spondee affect if you pay attention to the stress. 

There is a short word (from the stem lqk) in verses 17:2 and 19:1 in Judges with two consecutive silluq accents on each of its two syllables. There are 611 instances of two silluqs on one word remaining in my database of the Leningrad codex. Sometimes these are legitimate at the end of a verse for cadential emphasis. There are 18 instances of this particular diacritic combination on the stem lqk, e.g. לֻֽקַּֽח, to take, in the Scriptures. Most of them are in books I haven't yet done -- Samuel and Chronicles among them. The musician can make something of this apparent brief spondaic pulse.

17:2 of Judges. It is rare for the same accent under the text to be repeated on the same word.
But it does happen.

In the Psalms, doubling of an accent under the text occurs twice with a repeated munah, the fifth note of the scale, B, in Psalms 18:16, and 104:7. In each case the extra stress is on the last syllable of the word. Only one other accent below the text, the silluq, e, the tonic, is repeated on the same word. This occurs about 600 times in the Bible of which 93 are in the psalms. If you ever study the psalms -- and who would study them without the music  -- watch for them and imagine the emphatic pulse. 

Psalms 18:46 - three accents under one word!

In Psalms 18:46, I found three accents under a single word. One of these was a third silluq in the Leningrad codex. I corrected the middle one based on the earlier Aleppo codex to a d'khi, g, the third note of the scale. This changes the character of the final cadence.

Of course -- and I didn't put this in my instructions yesterday -- the addition of two bars changes the bar numbering for the rest of the psalm. So it's more than one image that has to be regenerated. I proved the correction process. It is independent of the database. So my database does not have to live past my best by date.

As to the other accents under the text, they are never doubled in a single word. One needs the database for a claim like this -- it requires a query or a filter like this: 

length(heb_word)-length(replace(heb_word,'1469')) >=8 and book_cd='PSALMS'

The answer is zero for all accents under the text except silluq and munah.

In case I forget

Here's how my 18-volume EPUB can be updated. I will assume that the tools used are Calibre EPUB software and Musescore.

To update the SVG images:

1. Open the MSCZ file for the chapter.
2. Adjust the Hebrew above the text to correct the te'amim as required. You may need a real word processor to format and type the Hebrew correctly. I could not copy Unicode from mgketer because it does not use the standard Unicode that I read to generate the music from the database.
3. Adjust the music to correspond to the Hebrew in accordance with the deciphering key. This you have to do by hand depending on the change to the te'amim that you are making. Adjust barring if needed -- join or separate bars with the tools menu. Adjust the bars changed to dotted. Or select them all and make them short lines. Bar lines are largely irrelevant in any case.
4. Check the lines for alignment of the Hebrew.
5. Export to SVG.
6. Run the batch file for the chapter to rename the files to what is expected in the EPUB.
7. Delete the EPUB SVG files for the chapter.
8. Import the new SVG files.
9. Change the Hebrew in the html file - the section that shows the te'amim only, to agree with the changes made in the MSCZ file.
10. Delete the SVG files on your computer.

The English guide can be changed in the html file as needed.

To underlay a new arrangement with language other than Hebrew:

1. Open the MSCZ file for the chapter.
2. Adjust the page length to the size you want to your score to be. 
3. Follow your musical imagination. Here are some of my earlier thoughts on this process.

At the moment I am not making these files public. If you want them now as opposed to whenever, let me know. Best step on the road for this is to buy the first available EPUB. Or write a review.

Best approach might be to get in touch with mgketer.org and write a program that will translate their Aleppo Codex text into music using a deciphering key. This is a long process filled with learning.

Tyndale House Bulletin

I was impressed by this intro to the greater and lesser traditional markings in the Leningrad codex because I have been working with both Genesis 1 and Jonah 4. Read it and see how clever the scribes were in numbering and annotating their Bibles. 

They processed pairs of words as I did in my search for concordance. My numbers do not agree with the markings of course because I am looking for consonant sequences only. My query does not use the vowels nor does it parse the sentence to see what the subject of the verb is. But the principle is similar, though I was not a scribe but a translator.

Singing the Scriptures - The Music of Amos

I now begin to have enough material to consider some aspects of the Scriptures from a musical point of view. Warning, I still have a small part of the whole, snippets of Genesis, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Samuel, and the minor prophets, and all - yes - all of the psalms. These are still in a sight-readers paradise and 95% in Hebrew only. I have not recorded them.

A shalshelet in Amos.

Amos 1:2 has a shalshelet, a poetry ornament in a prose book. There it is circled in red in the Aleppo codex, the zig-zaggy thing over the mem ֓מ. This is a surprise - and it requires me to change my program to account for this break in a fundamental assumption about the music: vis. that the Books of Truth, Psalms, Proverbs and the speeches of Job have a different (though overlapping) set of ornaments from the rest of the Tanach. I wonder how often this so-called rule is broken. I see there are four shalsheletim in Torah - and now I know there is at least one in the Prophets too! Live and learn.

From the music of Amos I also learn that the change in sublinear sign can be rare. When the prophet intones his three and four announcements, they are all intoned on one fundamental note with ornamentation. Mitchell in a forthcoming work on the Psalms of Ascent interprets a change of note as a stress marker, so I have put my dashed barlines at this point in the music. It works very well, so well that I no longer bother testing any other regular barline possibility. I count a phrase with 23 beats without a change in reciting note. (Amos 2:9). My music program can just handle it.

Here's an example of phrase structure within these first two chapters of Amos. This phrase is repeated 8 times with different objects in the first two chapters and each time (except for a minor variation for the children of Ammon) to the same music. It is music, pace the brilliant scholars who call them accents.

This is Amos 1:11a (to the rest point of the subdominant atenach) and its music.

כֹּ֚ה אָמַ֣ר יְהוָ֔ה עַל־שְׁלֹשָׁה֙ פִּשְׁעֵ֣י אֱד֔וֹם וְעַל־אַרְבָּעָ֖ה לֹ֣א אֲשִׁיבֶ֑נּוּ

A return to the tonic for the children of Ammon

And here's the confirmation that the children of Ammon in verse 13a get a lower note. See the silluq below the yod of benei.

So will I play any more with Amos - probably. There seems to be something to learn with every phrase I look at. I have left my PDF's and XML files at the shared location if anyone wants to help. (Don't you think you would find it fascinating! Let me know... ) And this kind of reading encourages slow and careful consideration. I think, for instance that the King James translation of these verses is over-determining the 'meaning' with the added words.  Because the rest-point in the music demands a rest, the addition of words after turn away violates the rhythm and sense. The sense could easily be compassion and not vindictiveness.

Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Edom, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; [KJV - read it for historical interest]

One generation assumes punishment, another assumes consequences, another leaves the gap and prays. Certainly these places - all of them, are still in need of prayer today. I confess though I do not know how to pray for kleptocrats except that the consequences might be swift and the shame complete.

Oh how different a psalm can seem to its music

So - what do you think of Psalm 12? How does the music carry it? Why is it where it is in the sequence of the Psalter?

Psalms 9 and 10 have, somewhat like recalcitrant childen, chanted the splendor of Psalm 8. Psalm 11 follows with the fundamentals overthrown but The Lord in his Holy Temple, in the heavens, his throne. Then Psalm 12 gives us the children of humanity with their vileness exalted on every side - not to mention Kiev, or Syria, or Central Africa, or the worship of Mammon at the expense of the poor. From this havoc of the poor and from the groaning of the needy, the Lord arises. Do we dare pray for such?

Here's my English to the Hebrew cantillation somewhat according the deciphering key of Haik-Vantoura but with the ornaments and steps taken from the Westminster Leningrad codex and manually compared to Aleppo (where I could read it - it is quite clear for Psalm 12).

The Hebrew: - pdf here untouched from the computer generation of the music. English pdf here. And below a bit of a comparison.

In this psalm, my English and the Hebrew were very far apart in syllable count. Sometimes Hebrew (syllables 186 words 79) was longer, sometimes English (count 'em if you like - the bars are all irregular). If you sing these - pay no attention to the note 'values'. There is no implied fixed rhythm in this psalm in either language.

Psalm 32 - Singing the Psalter

shows the missing silluq in the WLC

I have spent few days developing a version of Psalm 32 in English. There are significant differences from the version that Suzanne Haik Vantoura developed. Her version uses the Letteris edition of the Hebrew text. This edition differs from the Aleppo codex which she likely never saw.  Also available to me is the electronic edition of the Westminster Leningrad codex. This too disagrees with Letteris - but it is also defective in part. An obvious defect is the missing silluq at the end of verse 2. This is missing in the electronic version but (I hope) not in the facsimile.  But - alas - here (right image) is the missing bit extracted from the large facsimile pdf online here. (Grateful for the TOC here.)

shows the silluq - short vertical stroke - where expected

And here (left) is the Aleppo codex with the silluq clearly shown.

Isn't it amazing that one can do textual criticism from one's office at home!

There are bigger problems with this psalm and I have not pursued them all in detail. It is possible that the Aleppo codex may be wrong - who really knows. It is almost 1000 years later than the last time these songs could have been sung in the temple.

Here is my music for a few verses. Some of the problems are evident. Compare vs 3 - mine (computer generated from the Leningrad data) goes up - hers goes down. And in verse 4 (not shown for shv) it gets worse.  What does Aleppo say - is it closer to WLC?  I am glad to say it agrees with the WLC - yea!!!  Enough pictures - you can see it for yourself here. And if you want to critique my score - leave me a comment and I will send it to you.

The results of a test of an automated transcription of Psalm 1

Westminster Leningrad codex Asheri -
happy 

I can see the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) here in Unicode - If you go here and type in Psalms 1, you will get this result as the first word:

1:1אַ֥שְֽׁרֵי־

The coding on this site is very clean but that first word bothers me. It has an F (merkha) at the beginning of the verse.  And where I would expect the F, I see the missing tonic. The Letteris edition has this:

אַֽשְׁ֥רֵי.

Aleppo happy

If one then looks at the Aleppo codex, it is ambiguous. Both are problematical as far as understanding where Max Letteris got his interpretation. David Mitchell says Aleppo is superior to Letteris - so I should use it to verify the WLC Unicode - but... what will it lead to? This first note is just the beginning.

Here is the music based on the WLC - and here is a translation or two. The music was written without intervention from me using an automatic transcription algorithm which I wrote this week. The algorithm translates the Hebrew text into music XML. What can you do with the Bible? You can sing it - but with what melody? And in what style? This I hope to explore in the next five years and I hope many will share and continue the exploration - once I get my routine into a cloud offering so anyone can do it. The Letteris music is what I am used to through the work of Suzanne Haik Vantoura. The exploration will take some detailed work but at least the initial coding is now reduced by several hours.

The Letteris text for the psalm is here. The music above is not the same as my earlier transcription. This is a problem to me and uncovers several musical assumptions from Suzanne Haik Vantoura that I can only wonder about at this time. Did she impose cadential figures on the text? Did Max Letteris impose them? What is going on here? Prior work on this psalm is clustered here from some time ago.