Status report on the Swan Song

 Still alive and kicking, said the Swan.

Here's the current status on all fronts:

All volumes complete verse by verse with the music -- like this. 

This image contains: 

• 5 syllables (middle of last line)  in the score 
• over three words (top line Hebrew) of the first verse of 1 Chronicles
• a transcription (lyrics) based on a simple mapping of consonants and vowels
• a translation with verse number and harmonic progression in parentheses
• the Hebrew accents from which the score is derived
• the SimHebrew equivalent with verse number (bottom right).

There are about 34,400 separate images for the 23,196 verses. Their production and merge with the html was controlled by several procedures from my database. So they are an accurate representation of my translation and the automated music process, but of course open to textual and linguistic criticism.

Here's a more complex example. See if the syllable counts agree with the column of numbers in the bottom centre of the image. There is an occasional discrepancy +/- 1 difference between the syllable count and the notes in the score. I have found it impossible to find this bug. I'm not the only software developer with this problem. I suspect there are other bugs that I have not noticed.

Tasks to do: 

• for 7 volumes, update the html to include legarmeh (routine process, takes maybe a few hours of interrupted work to do -- probably unimportant).
• 10 more covers to design -- really fun to do. 10 days (not contiguous) and it will be done.
• 17 more ISBN's to get. Routine.
• 10 + brief introductions to the music of the volume. Very challenging. In this area my work has converged with another student of cantillation history. My data formats may be very useful to him and I have to think carefully to get good query design from my database to see the potential patterns.

Future work: to anyone who is interested, the data that is generally available now online in various places in Unicode can be coded for the questions we want to ask. It's a very large undertaking to consider the relationships in the Scripture itself and to reconcile the history of cantillation with the theoretical discovery that has been demonstrated by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura. By the way, a large number of video recordings of her work done by John Wheeler are now available (again) here. (Very slow start but they are there.)

My computer apparently has only a few months till its expiry date. The folks who make Windows do not consider it worthy to support. I have routinely 30 to 35 windows active on it. It is very fast and has adequate memory. This sin from Microsoft is duly noted for the heavenly assizes. I can certainly buy another computer but whether I can still install Oracle and the last working copy of my complex software and all the other things I need for this unique environment is moot. Maybe I will just maintain it off the web and go back to sneaker net to get any words out. But my expiry date is also approaching -- who knows when!

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.]

Next steps?

The 18 volumes are complete. Some stats: For the 21,535 verses of the Hebrew Bible, I required 34,442 images or about 1.48 images per verse. A few of these are non-musical images and some others are repeated so one could say that the music of the Bible is about 34 thousand lines of music, where each verse no matter how short it is takes at least one line, but may take up to four. A long verse can take up to 4 lines of 30 or so syllables, give or take a few depending on the ornamentation and frequency of changes of reciting note.  Here's an image of the first verses of Chronicles. This is from the PDF format allowing 6 1-line verses per page and requiring 442 pages! 

Sample page from Chronicles

Here's a page with longer verses from 2 Chronicles 25:

Longer verses on page 434 of the Chronicles PDF

It's curious that Calibre has a report that counts the usage of all characters of all types including the details of the cantillation. The details are not viewable with any degree of ease. The accents are there in a column but are unreadable -- too small in the table and lost in translation when converted to Excel. But if you were interested, there are 2,461 mercha accents in Chronicles... and only one zarqa. 2 Chronicles 19:2.

Only one zarqa!

This should not be surprising since Zarqa is uncommon in the prose, but the similarly shaped tsinnor is more frequent. These sign are similar to the modern musical sign for a turn -- a sideways S over the note to be ornamented. This particular verse has two in a row on one word  חֲנָ֘נִי֮. 

Two consecutive turns - rare example 1/2

One would think that such a combination is unique, but there is another word with two such ornaments on it in 2 Samuel 3:8. I suppose that one good turn deserves another. But to get into this historical rarity technically, musically, linguistically, or theologically, would be a distraction at the moment.

Two consecutive turns - rare example 2/2

Surprising what you discover when you have music in front of you. I would not be able to determine these accents from the Aleppo codex. 

A part of rare example 2/2 from Aleppo

You can see I have allowed myself to be distracted when I should be doing the shopping.

Swan song nearly completed

 I started this process in January of getting my data out of the database and into a form where it could provide 

1. a reading environment in epub or pdf form for people learning to read Hebrew text or music. 
2. a musical environment for hearing the words of Scripture in a form that never fails to surprise people who hear about it.
3. the music in a form that provides a starting point for those who want to develop it into songs and stories as illustrated on this blog over the last 15 years.
4. a translation that is open to criticism and changeable in the data manually for anyone who has the software to read the epub.
5. and all of it in a form that can be maintained by anyone with these two programs of publicly available software: Musescore, and Calibre. 

It's nearly done: 15 chapters left in 2 Chronicles to compare with Aleppo. (Perhaps a few hours work). Then about 40 chapters to format the music (a few days work). I hope in the coming months to analyse the types of differences between Aleppo and WLC, but I don't have a schedule or target for this at the moment. There are multiple types of differences. 

• Missing silluqs in WLC (a few, I did not explicitly look for them -- I found maybe 20 in the 7,000 or so verses I looked at).
• Additional silluqs in WLC -- thousands -- I would guess in 50% of the verses I looked at.
• Silluqs that should have been mercha or munach -- maybe 100 or so.
• Silluqs that seemed to move from one word to another.
• Silluqs that seemed to be imitating the same word repeated nearby.
• Silluqs on unstressed or stressed syllables.
• Silluqs on syllables with all sorts of different vowels, a, e, i, o, or u. I can't guess the frequencies.
• Silluqs (frequent) on common words like la (negative), ci (relative) , and mlc (king), Jerusalem and Judah and other less common names.
• Silluqs on prefixes, like l or m, but particularly frequent on h.
• Sometimes in a verse, all will be removed, or one is taken and the other left, or all of them are in both codices.

Maybe I will identify patterns more securely, but it will take a strategy I have not yet figured out.

Also I know I am prone to both error -- old eyes -- and tiredness. I will have missed several silluqs whose presence at the beginning of a verse would not have changed the music, but may be misleading in terms of stress if there is more than one accent on the lexical word. I will also have missed extra silluqs in Aleppo that are not in WLC if they were on verses that I did not look at. It's also possible that I may have deleted where I should not have. 

When I now read through the entire corpus to proof read my epub, I will look and listen for readability, but if I choose a verse to describe in the volume, I must verify that I have not made these blunders of omission.

Here's the percentage of verses with changes I have found - the last 15 chapters of 2 Chronicles will not change the >25% significantly for that book. (Ended up at 28.22%!)

Differences between Aleppo and Leningrad codices --
comparing silluq in WLC on tanach.us with Aleppo on mgketer.org

Next step is for me -- and anyone else who would volunteer -- to take a few examples for each volume and see if we can find distinct musical patterns in the differing volumes. I will probably try these out as blog posts. If you have verses you want, let me know in a comment. I will be back to blogging more regularly.

I would like this final work --that demonstrates the music embedded in the Biblical text-- to be widely available and used -- I don't know that I will give it away, but I hope it will not be lost. Let me know if you are interested. There are now 18 volumes, 929 music scores and supporting files.

Before Jonathan Wheeler disappeared from the web, he gave me -- and likely a lot of other folks -- a DVD of a huge amount of material on Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura (available here and here). I hope I will have done her work a service by making this final work stimulated in me -- partly by him --  since 2010.

If you want to take part in the exploration of the music, please send me an email at drobertmacd at gmail. Please let me know why you are interested and what skills you can bring to bear on the opportunity.

Summarizing the silluq differences between Aleppo and Leningrad

I am grateful to Benjamin Denckla, commenter on the post here who wants me to learn about meteg and ga'ya. These are signs I cannot fathom, and they interfere with the music. If they are important, they need a different sign and Unicode that does not confuse the music. 

Some preliminary examples I reported on here in November. 

I have completed about 85% of the Bible so far, jot by jot -- the music is definitely an example of jots and tittles. But very important. Jesus tells us that not one such jot is unimportant. But 99% of Christians who read the Bible are not the slightest bit aware that there is a musical score coded in the Hebrew text. Truths abstracted from the text lack tone of voice -- so they will be confused and give bad advice and bad theology from the text.

Here is a preliminary graph of the change count by verse. 3,102 verses with one or more differences (excluding Samuel, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah at this time). Details are possible but a lot of work and I probably won't take that on till I am finished this project if then.

Percentage of verses with changes related to silluq

As I noted too brusquely in my comment: This set of changes has crept in over the last 1000 years. Every edition since Aleppo has more and more of these vertical signs in it. I began my study with the Leningrad codex. I now see it contains thousands of differences in the reproduction of the text. 95% of them are have to do with silluq. 95% of those are additional marks -- and they are without rhyme or reason to me. As far as I can see, they occur apparently randomly and not with any consistency relative to long vowels or short vowels. The other 5% are removals or confusion with munah or mercha.

Apart from visual difficult readings in manuscripts and fatique (putting the pen down in the wrong place), it is likely that most of these were caused by confusion between musical intent of the silluq and pronunciation intent with meteg, a separate magisterium.

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 have explained 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.

Status of the music publications

Here is one of the foundational verses of the Old Testament, Moses' testimony to the root of the character of the One who goes by the Name i-h-v-h (as you can see in the lower right bold SimHebrew text).

This verse from Exodus 34 is part of a song sung to a friend. It is the only verse where the Name is repeated in a sentence. There is one other verse, the start of Psalm 104 where the Name is adjacent to itself, but the words are separated by a cadence in the music.

These images are extracted by screen capture from my new 18 volume set of e-books on the music of the Bible. I am now about 70% complete for all verses. 

You can help the project by reading or reviewing a copy of the first volume, the Book of Job. In this book, the one who goes by the Name sings again as a character in the play with a long set of speeches finally directed at the protagonist, Job. 

Those of you learning Hebrew can see five ways of looking at the Hebrew text: the music, the pointed text, an eclectic WLC corrected from the Aleppo codex, a simple transcription for singing, the Hebrew without vowels so you can see and learn the cantillation signs alone, and the SimHebrew based on the full modern spelling of the words in a left to right simulation of Hebrew in the Latin character set. Above that is my English guide, and the type of verse by cadence. The music is derived from the deciphering key to the embedded cantillation accents as inferred from their usage by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura in the last century. 

If you are interested in the Torah, the first five books, the books of Moses are all complete and ready for learning cantillation, restoring the tone of voice to the Scripture. Also complete are the three poetry books, the five scrolls, and all the later prophets. Still to do are Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles, and the former prophets, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. I still hope to finish all the books this year. 

And I will ask you, and you make known to me if you are interested. Please direct inquiries to publishing at qualum dot com. (Or leave a comment.) You can buy the e-book here.

And this is the status at present:

Third verse of Swan Song

Whether this is my final project or not is moot. There’s a long story behind this effort. What I am doing is getting a usable copy of my data out to the public where all the work is independent of my unique and now obsolescent database and its various interfaces. All that is required to critique or even recreate my work is the 18 volumes of the e-books, and the music and batch files if you wanted to make changes or reproduce the music in a different form.

Only a few people are really interested at this time. But suppose you were regularly involved with chanting the Tanach, here it all is in principle in a form that is easy to learn from. I can imagine this being used in the yearly cycle of Torah, Haftarah, and feast day recitations.

Or suppose you really decided that learning the Hebrew Bible was important to you. Here is the data in a transparent form complete with tone of voice.

(That doesn't mean that you would easily understand it-- in fact understanding is not the point, it's love that is the point -- and who can possibly understand that!)

Also easily duplicatable are my programs and functions to create the Music XML from a Unicode base. The programmers at mgketer.org could do this easily if they chose. They have a better starting point with their database than I had when I wrote the program a baker's dozen or so years ago.

So my data and methods can dissolve into the ether with me, but my presentation of the text is unique at present and can continue within the bounds of the technology that carries it. All you need is an e-book reader. Anyone can read it on a phone or computer that has the right software. And maybe it will see a print version some day. 

But suppose that you wanted to have control over the content of the e-book. I recommend Calibre, and a music program -- I use Musescore (4.5.1 at present). You don't need either of these to read the text and music, only if you want to modify the text or music. If you are going to build the text again based on your modifications, you may also need the batch files that take the single line pages and convert them to verses that fit into the e-book. That's much easier than putting it all in a database.

Status today is 63% of chapters done, slightly over 55% of verses.

Complete books: 

Job - available for review or pre-review purchase here.

Psalms, the Five Scrolls, - ready for production process,

Proverbs, Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, The Twelve, - Music complete, awaiting short summary of the music of the volume, then to production process,

Leviticus, half-way through the music, estimated completion in a few days. 

The remaining 8 volumes are in a stub form, i.e. the e-book framework is ready for the first chapter. There are about 75 days remaining for me to work at 5 chapters a day - roughly 20 minutes per chapter - reviewing the verses that have internal returns to the tonic, running the html and music programs, sculpting the music, and loading it into the e-book. I hope I have time to finish. Then I would like to read and chant the entire Bible, but I don't think I have time to do that so I will have to run some routines to see if there are significant differences that can be pointed out in a short intro to each volume. The full introductory paragraphs are only in the Job volume. 

Anyone who has followed my work probably needs little introduction to the presentation.

Second verse of Swan Song

 February 4, I reported that I was 22% along the way to presenting the music of the bible in SVG images verse by verse in epub format. 

I measured where I am as of March 22.

The first volume is being edited by my publisher. So this will see the light of availability - perhaps by Canada Day. Not to rush too much the thoughts that happen when you are doing a project like this. As you can see from the table below, I have completed 7 volumes of a planned 18. These are the 438 chapters of Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, The Twelve, Psalms, Job, and the Five Scrolls. That's 47% of the chapters but only 38% of the verses -- so a lot of removal of spurious silluqs and sculpting of the music is left to do. Probably some tasks could be done by an agent or script in a musescore addon-- but it might take longer to write and use than 488 right clicks over the next few months! 

I'm still astonished at the number of spurious silluq accents, 1 verse in every three this morning has one or more errors in the Leningrad codex. The resulting tonic monotone shows that no one understood what they were doing to the music. It's not that there aren't, sometimes, dips to the tonic in the musical line. It's a long recitation on the tonic that should be rare. 

It's curious too that these extra accents result in more than one per lexical word. This too happens in the music. This shows, as I have noted elsewhere, that accents aren't just for an 'accented' syllable. They are melody, and in some ways, though limited in this music, an accent can occur anywhere. It's quite possible, and often happens, that a syllable marked with an 'accent' is lyrically an upbeat.

A process for maintenance of the music once it is extracted from the database

At some point I hope to have EPUB's for every chapter of the Bible, one verse at a time with the music. I designed what is likely to be my final product to help people learn the music of the Hebrew Bible. 

Here is a quick look at Isaiah 40 verse 1.

The music embedded in the text of Isaiah 40, verse 1

And here's the text:

Isaiah 40: (Verses 1 to 1) Syllables: 14; Longest recitation: 4; Tenor: g 42.86%;
Ornament density: 0%; Average phrase length: 7.

1 Comfort, comfort, my people, says your God. (1-4-1)
א נחמ֥ו נחמ֖ו עמ֑י יאמ֖ר אלהיכֽם	8 6		a nkmu nkmu ymi iamr alohicm

Notice how the music moves based on the accents under the text. Count them (5) and observe the five movements from the starting note to the mid point and back.

Everything is in the database. I am just beginning to work on this chapter and it fits my purpose in this blog post. It took a few short minutes for me to produce that music and text directly from the database. I didn't type or scribe any of it. I had to use a png image instead of svg on this platform since blogger doesn't (yet) support svg. 

We wrote data-driven programs. If the data was well-designed, it was easy to get the required output from it.

Over the last few months, I have been getting the data out of the database and into epubs where normal people could maintain it if necessary. It is becoming simpler.

For those sections that I have finished, the music and the data surrounding it can be maintained by anyone who can use Musescore and Calibre. No other dependencies needed - except to be able to rename files. No database knowledge required.

Finally I figured out a way to generate the html and .bat files so that they have the best chance of corresponding to individual lines of music. Roughly 30 or 31 syllables will fit on a page width depending on the ornament density of the verse. Most verses fit within three lines of music on an iPhone, making it possible to have the Bible in Hebrew and English with its embedded music in your pocket.

Music Files

I will deliver all the necessary music files and verified batch rename files to my publisher if we have success, so that if people wanted, for instance, the base music for a chapter, it would be available in an mscz (music zip) file. Load the mscz file, change the page length to the length you want, remove the line feeds as desired, and you have the full score for a chapter. Arrange and perform as you wish. The music itself is not copyright. It is part of the Bible and derived by a key that is discoverable from the way the te'amim are used in the Hebrew text.

Possibly some day, Calibre or some other program or avatar will be able to sing the music for the reader, but that was not possible the last time I checked. And I won't be checking any time soon if I am going to get all the data out and ready for study. I'm sorry that more people don't follow Wm Byrd's injunction to learn to sing. And by the way, learn to read music also.

I have given away the music xml and pdfs many years ago, (see the music page) but I had not created and sculpted the music images into scalar vector graphics (svg) form, one verse at a time. Nor had I fixed the WLC data to conform to Aleppo as much as I have this time round. It is still not perfect but it is closer to the original, and I am not convinced that even Aleppo is clear of the kinds of error I have encountered.

Maintaining the data is trickier than just using the music to prepare an arrangement. The music images are directly dependent on the Hebrew text. The four versions of the Hebrew text seen above in the image and text should remain consistent if the epub needs to be updated.

This is my process for getting the data out of the database into the e-pub:

1. Fix premature descents to the tonic – compare WLC verse by verse with MG Crown Aleppo codex. Check all internal descents to the tonic against mgketer site. I do this before generating the music. This step can be done for multiple chapters -- I keep going until I get tired. (Code to compare the two versions would be difficult to write. WLC uses a different level of Unicode from mgketer, coding sequences of diacritics differ even within the WLC, and there are a host of irrelevant notes and other comments that need to be ignored.) So far in about 300 chapters and about 6500 verses, I have corrected about 700 errors in the WLC. That's just over a 10% error rate. In what -- just over 100 years of copying? (Copyists get tired too!) The database remembers my changes so I can tell what I have done and when. I use three windows: 
• my proprietary update screen for the database, 
• the mgketer chapter, (in Hebrew only).
• a filter on my shortcut work file showing the notes to isolate the verses I suspect are in error. 
2. Generate music XML using my music generation page. This can be done for multiple chapters that have been verified. Takes a few seconds per chapter.
3. Run the data and the batch file for the chapter to html format. This program is one of many I have written for extracting data in various formats.
4. Open the music with Musescore, load the style file for one line per page. Open the bat file with a text editor and check the music 'pages' against the batch file. Page size is in the image:

1. Load the one-line style. [Saved in my Google Drive here]
2. Mark all beams as disconnected -- they will disappear (use multi-select). Make all triplets invisible – note stems are already invisible from program that generates xml.
3. Force returns on all verses – one verse per 'page'. (Every verse ends with a rest and a barline.) Fix alignment of text and check for slurs that displace text or make the lyrics line too low, adjust to under or over as needed. (Change all slurs to above - correct the few that get in the way of text rather than the many that get in the way of lyrics.)
4. (Poetry only -- add breath for ole-veyored – should automate this but tricky).
5. Adjust margins if needed.
6. Save to mscz file.
7. Verify the batch file against the music. Must agree on pages. Possible to insert a blank page and delete it later -- mark the bar as not included. (I have only had to do this once -- my techniques seem to be improving.)
8. Export svg to work area.
9. Use saved .bat file in cmd window or equivalent to rename the files.
10. Load svg files and html into e-pub.
11. Verify. (Calibre verify function will find errors in renaming if you miss them).
12. Delete the svg files in the work area.

This process takes from 10 minutes to an hour for longer prose chapters.

All Musescore files and batch rename files are saved in case steps 1 to 12 need repeating. Spot corrections are possible but tricky since the text and music are so integrated. E.g. a change in a word affects the music, the staff text, the Hebrew words with te’amim also and potentially, bar numbering. 

If a change is required, load the mscz file, make the changes and repeat the process from step 6.

I've documented this for my use -- but if anyone takes over what I am doing, who knows, it might give them some ideas.

What would motivate someone to do this task when nearly four-score years? Well, it's fascinating and it changes how you read. I hope that we (humanity) might start to read the Biblical text with love rather than our own fear and petty prejudices. So that we might learn to comfort each other, the people that Isaiah is referring to -- indirectly of course. 

Swan Song

 Hi Friends,

I am not in any immediate danger apart from falling on the ice or in the snow, but I am beginning my good-byes; my swan song is taking shape.

My swan song is a visual presentation of the Music of the Bible, verse by verse with Scalar Vector Graphic images -- and zero commentary from me. This is a job that I was prepared for by the zigzag pattern of my learning (or not) over the first 60 years of my life. Nineteen years on out of this somewhat formless and in some areas undisciplined period, there has emerged a presentation of the jots and tittles of the Hebrew Bible, the like of which has not been seen on this earth to date. That's largely because it is detailed work requiring a host of different kinds of software and some theoretical discoveries that had not existed till the late 20th century. I express my dependency and gratitude to the many software engineers who have created the base tools I required for this final effort. 

I am indebted to many software engineers:

1. Kovid Goyal, who created the Calibre e-book software,
2. and the Musescore team,
3. also to the late David Driver, dearly missed, chief programmer who assisted so much in internationalizing my database interface,
4. and to the creators of tanach.us, the online version of the Westminster Leningrad codex and its web service,
5. and to the creators of mgketer.org for the availability of a readable Aleppo codex.
6. and to the creators of Oracle and MusicXML, tools that have been essential to me for this work.
7. Not to mention -- and I should have -- W3Cschools and their encouragement of the creation of high quality SVG graphics.

The presentation will be in (well maybe) 19 volumes, 0 to 18 -- like this: My status report as of today.

Proposed volumes, nothing like starting at volume 0, a precursor that is required for each of the others.

You can see that I am 22% through the process. It's longish and tiring but most of the presentation is automated. I verified book 3 of the Psalter since yesterday comparing the two editions, WLC and Aleppo for premature or confused silluqs - only 17 errors. I expect the prose sections to take a bit longer.

I am hoping to finish by the end of this year. The most difficult part is comparing tanach.us with mgketer. It would be possible to do software for this step rather than a filter on internal tonics in the musical phrase, then a visual scan of the Hebrew to compare the pointing to the Aleppo codex. But such a program would be more complex than the manual process which takes a minute per verse perhaps, but is also a good practice for reading the Hebrew.

You will see from the table this is an estimated 3 gigs of e-books -- I wonder who will read and study them and do a more complete analysis of the music than I have done these past 10 years. The introductory paragraphs to this series are available in draft form in e-book form me -- just ask for the link. I would welcome critical readers for each volume and feedback. My working title for the series is God's Tone of Voice. Message me if you are interested. See my 'about' page for contact info.

Each verse is like this:

Sample verse, not SVG since blogger doesn't support it;

Those of you learning Hebrew can see four ways of looking at the text: the pointed text, an eclectic WLC corrected from the Aleppo codex, a simple transcription for singing, the Hebrew without vowels so you can see and learn the cantillation signs alone, and the SimHebrew based on the full modern spelling of the words in a left to right simulation of Hebrew in the Latin character set. Above that is my English guide, and the type of verse by cadence. 

Psalms 110 - a diversion

When you find the road blocked, in the UK it's not a detour that you take, but a diversion, if I remember correctly. What are we to make of this psalm?

The inscription is the first key: Note that it is one where ldvid precedes mzmor. See also Psalms 24, 40, 68, 101, 109, 110, 139. The normal order for this phrase is mzmor ldvid. Kimhi says of these psalms that first the Holy Spirit rested on David and then he wrote the psalm. There is a commentary on this psalm by Kimhi here. (Kimhi was edited and published in 1883 in Cambridge, so Forbes could have had access to this in principle.) Kimhi will not begin with the prejudgments of Christianity about what a phrase signifies. The explanation of the priesthood of Mechizedek is very helpful:

since in his blessing he [Melchizedek] put Abraham first over the most high God, the Holy One, blessed be He, removed the Priesthood from him and gave it to Abraham, because it is said Thou art a priest for ever ... because of the word which Melchizedek spoke.

I had read bits of Kimhi when I did my translation but not this part. There is no need for a special gloss for the very common root dbr here in verse 4.

So this psalm is about David. I have rendered it as 'to', but prepositions are notorious for taking on many glosses. About would be just fine as a gloss. It makes good sense.

I agree of course, that the NT applies this psalm to Jesus, but I will be drawn into the host of motivations that apply these psalms in that first century or two of the common era to 'explain' why they or I would still apply it thus. Do we not all attempt to rule within and among our enemies? And I should not forget that we are, in spite of the enemies within and around us, also accompanied by many who are willing in the day of our weal. I like the ambiguity of that word. For there is both welt and wealth in our struggle.

Yahweh has sworn and without a sigh. Are we also accompanied by the real power? When does Yahweh sigh (nkm)? Or as traditional translations read, repent? First over humanity prior to the flood. Then at the incident of the golden calf. It is part of his character. It occurs only once in the Psalter. You can see them all at the link.

Verse 7 often surprises me. Kimhi associates it with Balaam's proverb of Numbers 23:24. For lifting the head high, he refers to David's reputation as noted in 2 Samuel 8:13.

Syllables: 143. Words: 65. Roots: 53. Root Recurrence: 32%. Average per verse: 3.

advn (2) aib (2) ap arx ath gvh gvi dbr dvd din drc hdm hdr zmr kil 'tl ihvh (3) ivm (2) ild imn (2) iwb chn cn l la mkx (2) m'th mla mlc (2) nam ndb nkl nkm yd yzz yl (4) ylm ym xdq xivn qdw qrb raw (2) rbh rgl rdh rvm rkm wby wkr wit wlk wth

לְדָוִ֗ד מִ֫זְמ֥וֹר נְאֻ֤ם יְהוָ֨ה ׀ לַֽאדֹנִ֗י שֵׁ֥ב לִֽימִינִ֑י עַד־אָשִׁ֥ית אֹ֝יְבֶ֗יךָ הֲדֹ֣ם לְרַגְלֶֽיךָ		1 Of David a psalm, an oracle of Yahweh to my Lord. Sit at my right hand, till I set your enemies as your footstool.
a ldvid mzmor naum ihvh ladoni wb limini yd-awit aoibiç hdom lrgliç	5 11 12	l/dvd m/zmr nam ihvh l/adn\i wb l/imn\i yd a/wit aib\ic hdm l/rgl\ic
מַטֵּֽה־עֻזְּךָ֗ יִשְׁלַ֣ח יְ֭הוָה מִצִּיּ֑וֹן רְ֝דֵ֗ה בְּקֶ֣רֶב אֹיְבֶֽיךָ		2 Yahweh will send the rod of your strength out of Zion. Rule within and among your enemies.
b m'th-yuzç iwlk ihvh mxion rdh bqrb aoibiç	11 8	m'th yz\c i/wlk ihvh m/xivn rdh b/qrb aib\ic
עַמְּךָ֣ נְדָבֹת֮ בְּי֪וֹם חֵ֫ילֶ֥ךָ בְּֽהַדְרֵי־קֹ֭דֶשׁ מֵרֶ֣חֶם מִשְׁחָ֑ר לְ֝ךָ֗ טַ֣ל יַלְדֻתֶֽיךָ		3 Your people are willing in the day of your weal. In the honour of holiness from the womb of the dawn, yours is the dew of your childhood.
g ymç ndbot biom kilç bhdri-qodw mrkm mwkr lç 'tl ildutç	10 9 7	ym\c ndb\t b/ivm kil\c b/hdr\i qdw m/rkm m/wkr l\c 'tl ild\tic
נִשְׁבַּ֤ע יְהוָ֨ה ׀ וְלֹ֥א יִנָּחֵ֗ם אַתָּֽה־כֹהֵ֥ן לְעוֹלָ֑ם עַל־דִּ֝בְרָתִ֗י מַלְכִּי־צֶֽדֶק		4 Yahweh has sworn and without a sigh, You are a priest forever, by the word of Melchizedek.
d nwby ihvh vla iinkm ath-cohn lyolm yl-dbrti mlci-xdq	16 7	n/wby ihvh v/la i/nkm ath chn l/yvlm yl dbr\ti mlc\i xdq
אֲדֹנָ֥י עַל־יְמִֽינְךָ֑ מָחַ֖ץ בְּיוֹם־אַפּ֣וֹ מְלָכִֽים		5 My Lord is at your right hand. He will wound kings in the day of his anger.
h adonii yl-iminç mkx biom-apo mlcim	7 9	adn\i yl imn\c mkx b/ivm ap\v mlc\im
יָדִ֣ין בַּ֭גּוֹיִם מָלֵ֣א גְוִיּ֑וֹת מָ֥חַץ רֹ֝֗אשׁ עַל־אֶ֥רֶץ רַבָּֽה		6 He will advocate among the nations, a fullness of bodies. He will wound exceedingly a head on earth.
v idin bgoiim mla gvviiot mkx raw yl-arx rbh	10 8	i/din b/gvi\m mla gv\ivt mkx raw yl arx rbh
מִ֭נַּחַל בַּדֶּ֣רֶךְ יִשְׁתֶּ֑ה עַל־כֵּ֝֗ן יָרִ֥ים רֹֽאשׁ		7 ♪g He will imbibe from the torrent in the way. Therefore he will lift a head high.
z mnkl bdrç iwth yl-cn irim raw	8 5	m/nkl b/drc i/wth yl cn i/rim raw

1	[Matthew 22:44, Acts 2:34-35, Ephesians 1:20, Hebrews 1:13, 10:12-13, 1 Peter 3:22]
3	weal, חיל (kil), or wealth or force, both of which I have used in other verses. The חיל of Egypt is destroyed in the sea. The parallels expressing womb and youth suggests a birthing image. The archaic weal (e.g. as in common weal) can be used to mean both wealth and hurt as in the birth process.
4	[Hebrews 5:6, 7:17, 21]

The Music of Psalms 110

Following Psalms 110, one of two oracles in the Psalter, we have the two acrostics 111, and 112. David is a man after God's own heart, so his journeys in Psalms 110 are celebrated by these two acrostics, one for the one who fears Yahweh and the other for Yahweh. Note how each of us is thus invited to become like Yahweh. Yet not alone as if individual perfection was possible, but together with the willing people and the power of God as Psalms 110 notes.

The Psalms are about character and the development of a community of the merciful, who are 'likest God'.

First lessons in learning Hebrew

I am presenting the music to a class on Monday. I think music should be the first lesson in learning the Hebrew text - what do you think?

My handout is here in pdf form.

Reading 1000 pages alone

Joshua R. Jacobson, Chanting the Hebrew Bible, The Complete Guide to the Art of Cantillation is on my desk. Also there are a host of reference books open in various positions and a computer with 12 pages on the web open, a dozen other programs running including a remote link to my office computer a few kilometers away with more programs running. Such a state that when the computers get updated, it takes 5 to 10 minutes to recover where I was.

How will I read these 1000 pages alone with so many bookmarks being kept for me. Well maybe one at a time and maybe not. I am both impatient and grumpy, a resistant learner, I suppose.

When it comes to the music, it seems to me that there is both a preserving and a scattering of knowledge over the last 2000 or more years in the Jewish traditions of cantillation.

On the one hand, the text has been lovingly preserved and we are all grateful, but the music has been elaborated in all sorts of ways - and perhaps this is as it should be, for music is above all creative and an expression of beauty, though I think I have heard the odd cantor in a hurry at times.

Suzanne Haik-Vantoura's scheme was foreign to me when it was introduced to me in 2010 at the Oxford conference on the Psalms, but it had an immense appeal to me because of the inferences she had made based on the data she discovered. And they were the inferences of one who designs from a simple principle, like the four letters of the DNA alphabet. One could grasp immediately that learning was possible. And I heard the results. There is a scale, modal for the Psalms, Proverbs, and the speeches of Job, and a full octave scale (not exactly diatonic but familiar) for the remaining '21' books. You may remember I described it here and have explored it in many posts. Others have also written about it.

Here is the first set of marks, the scale for the prose books as deciphered by Suzanne Haik-Vantoura (SHV).
ב֧ ב֤ ב֣ ב֑ ב֖ ב֥ בֽ ב֛
These she sets to correspond (reading left to right) exactly to a tonic sol-fa scale with a raised fifth. C D E F, G# A B C. Notice how close the poetry scale is: D# E F# G A B C.
ב֤ ב֣ ב֑ ב֖ ב֥ בֽ ב֢
All these pitches are relative to the tonic, the third note of the prose scale and the second note of the poetry scale.

There it is in a very few words, the germ, the design document. Of course the names are foreign, and I haven't mentioned the ornaments (see the link and my next post). And the tonic, the second note of the modal scale or the third note of the prose scale, can be any note that is comfortable for the singer, and so on. The names are difficult to get into my head. I now have a few. If they were sung as part of a piece, one could remember them as one remembers language. And with SHV's scheme, one starts with the music. The names are not as important as the impact of the sound. And the sound accomplishes the disjunctive and conjunctive aspects of punctuation without one having to remember a 1000 rules. One can, in fact, probably derive the rules from the usage.

Breakfast anyone? It is food for the love of Scripture. In a period when the ear and the tone was known, perhaps as long ago as 700 BCE, it was taught by rote from the then known abstraction of the design. And there were variations, depending on how you tuned your lyre. Perhaps it was passed from generation to generation in this way for years. When the temple was destroyed the first time, and the song was no longer being taught in the temple schools, to preserve the sound, it was reduced to a set of little squiggles representing hand signals. This is a common way of documenting music in the ancient world before the advent of neumes in the late first millennium CE.

But the design document, the rationale behind the squiggles, has been lost, and now there are a myriad of aural interpretations. Torah manuscripts for chanting even today are written without vowels or music. The cantillation must be memorized. When the temple was destroyed again in 70 CE, the design disappeared and an oral tradition was forced upon the scattered community. The question is - did SHV uncover the original design or something close to it?

How can I get away from these 1000 pages? I'm through the punctuation bit. Now I have many pages of music to see - but it seems No written out examples from the text of the Bible. One good example would teach so much, or even one text with the dozens of settings. Instead I am faced with a host of fragments to integrate with libretto being the name of the sign to see if there is an overall principle. Ah - I've remembered there is a CD - I am going back to aural learning mode - yea! But the first of the 87 aural examples made me laugh - it has the underlay 'siluq' illustrating a few seconds of exercise. But there some examples that are real text sung - this will give me what I need since I can reduce them to music for comparison's sake. (It will also train my ear in Hebrew. Tov.)

And I did find one short example on paper (page 849) from Lamentations 3:1-6. It is a special melody but set with underlying text rather than a libretto consisting of the names of the signs. And I think I see a few verses of Esther. This will give me at least a few direct comparisons from Jacobson's hand which I can compare with examples from Vantoura (whom he mentions in the Bibliography but only there!). So what I will do, as HaShem has patience with me, is to construct examples based on the CD and compare the systems against the inferred design of Vantoura's that I have. It will take several posts - I think I already told you (and me) that.

This site is very good for the technical stuff. Let's take that as a given. My article referenced above is OK for SHV's scheme, and I have produced hundreds of examples and can produce any part of the Bible on a few minutes notice. But patience! Where is the germ of the music? My next post will have a summary table of sign and musical expression to support reading the text for 'meaning'. And let meaning be open-ended and shrewd, not superficial or demeaning. And let me, us, not be impatient and grumpy, resistant learners.