A review on translation - Saadia Gaon

Biblical Translation in the Making: The Evolution and Impact of Saadia Gaon's Tafsr
Steiner, Richard C.

This one is a great review to read - even if you only read the review. Debate over translation is not new to our time. You might recall this blog post on Genesis 1:1 among others - here is a perspective on it from 1200 years ago

For example, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen 1:1) becomes: “The first of what God created was heaven and earth…” in the Tafsīr, which reflects Hunayn b. Ishạ̄q’s choice of translation.Steiner argues that the classic understanding of “In the beginning…” supports the Aristotelian view that time was uncreated, which was untenable to Saadia, and with this one bold stroke  he  irrevocably  broke  with  prior  traditional literal translations.

Cool! I doubt that "In the beginning" supports Aristotle's uncreated time. But for me, it's the brief insight into polemics from a distant time that is intriguing.

Project milestone

Friends, I have delivered my manuscript Seeing the Psalter to the publisher. After 6 months of proofing, and 4 months of critical input from my wife, Diana, we have a manuscript. Based on my last post on this in June - it took three months to edit the last four books of the Psalter, Psalms 42-150. The book is 10 pages shorter and has several thousand minor improvements in brush strokes. Less is often more. I eliminated the Greek and Latin from the text. Hebrew and English are an adequate complexity. I have added a 2 page excursus on Music in the Psalms based on the te'amim of the Hebrew text. The te'amim are a compact musical score according to the theory of Suzanne Haik-Vantoura. Note Jonathan Wheeler's post on the problems with the te'amim in the manuscripts.

Psalm 150 - the music of the te'amim

I developed this score from deciphering the te'amim in an edition of the TNK from my friend and choir director, dated 1946 and belonging to her husband.The signs are different from the other editions I have. This one is by Max Me`ir Halevi Letteris. Yea - I found one. It is difficult to deal with the signs electronically. I wonder if I can get a keyboard that will do it...  I reverted to extended decimal html to get these right. I also obeyed as best I could the instruction to use syllable rhythm. So don't interpret the time signatures woodenly. I think for our choir, I would use an antiphonal approach as noted. Maybe also have some cymbals and a trumpeter.

Why E minor - what about E major?  It works both ways. I then checked my transcription against this performance.

The textual problem

I have compared the leteris edition (for get the spelling) with other editions of the Hebrew text that I have - and with respect to the music, it is different.

Psalm 150:2 Letteris: הַ֭לְלוּהוּ בִגְבֽוּרֹתָ֑יו    הַ֝לְל֗וּהוּ כְּרֹ֣ב גֻּדְלֽוֹ
Psalm 150:2 others: הַֽלְל֥וּהוּ בִגְבֽוּרֹתָ֑יו    הַֽ֝לְל֗וּהוּ כְּרֹ֣ב גֻּדְלֽוֹ׃

How then can one tell which markings to use? The punctuation and melodic inferences in the markings are a highly compact system with little or no redundancy. That makes them highly subject to being miscopied. That will give me something to do over the next 7 years.

What should a volume on music contain - text, cd, examples of musical reception history, various forms of chanting over the last 20 centuries???

For now - my usual random research methods...

My easy cheat-sheet for the te-amim

This is a really quick summary of the basic scales and ornamentation of the te'amim as far as I understand it so far. What remains subject to non-specific textual elements are things like rhythm and mode - i.e. which notes might or might not have accidentals.  

You can see at a glance that the prose ornamentation is more elaborate than the poetic, even for the same sign. This morning, after reading the lesson in English, I sang the last verse of 2 Samuel 18. David's lament over Absalom is prose. Yesterday's version used the poetic ornaments. In performance I corrected them to prose ornaments.

Prose applies to all Biblical books except Psalms, Proverbs, and the speeches of Job, all of which use the poetic markings.  I think the names are troublesome for there is much more poetry in the Bible than in these three books.  Perhaps the names should be the elaborate and the sparse. 

update: I added the numbers above to enable typing these symbols in extended html - so e.g. the Beth with a squiggle on it is this ampersand, #, 1489, ; ampersand, #, 1454, (or 1432) and it looks like this: ב֮ or ב֘ depending where you want the squiggle. Note 1450 is missing - discovered in the last stages of testing a program to draft the music automatically (unicode to xml translation).

update: I added the shortest names I could find so these can be referred to in text. Note that the tifha mercha provides a cadence after an oleh - called oleh ve-yored, rising and falling.

Pashta is the prose version of qadma. They have differing placement. ב֙ ב֨ I will replace this eventually with a table reconciling the coding and the text of Wickes (1881, 87).

References:

• http://musicofthebiblerevealed.wordpress.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantillation
• http://www.mechon-mamre.org/c/ct/c0.htm
• Vantoura, Suzanne Haik-. 1976. The Music of the Bible Revealed: The Deciphering of a Millenary Notation. 
• The Music of the Bible Revealed, www.rakkav.com/biblemusic/pages/thekey.htm, interpretation of the te’amim. 
• Articles ignoring or supporting Haik-Vantoura: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=music_faculty_pubs (no mention) http://home.scarlet.be/~tsf07148/theo/Resinging.pdf Mitchell (brief summary)

Sunday's reading

I am reading 2 Samuel - a few verses from chapter 18 containing the lament of David over the death of Absalom - a verse set to favorite musical settings by Tomkins and Weelkes.
 Here is my reading of the te'amin for this verse.

David's Lament on the Death of Absalom, his son
 from 2 Samuel 19:1[E 18:33] sung here

Learning the te'amim

John Wheeler has posted a response to my exercise of writing a score based on Mme. Suzanne Haik-Vantoura's method of interpreting the te'amim, the cantillation signs in the Hebrew Bible.  My initial request to John was to discover the information needed to learn to sight-read these very condensed signs as if they were a readable musical score. I am reasonably confident that this is possible.

Although I set the prior work in a triple meter, I expect the music is more like traditional plainsong than a chant of fixed rhythm.

I will study and compare what John has posted. I see that Mechon-Mamre also has a full text with cantillation online here.