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| N.B.: A WinZip
(.zip) archive (17.9 MB) containing a PowerPoint Presentation (.ppt) and
sound files (.mp3) summarizing the historical and musical background to Suzanne
Haïk-Vantoura's work may be downloaded via
this link. |
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You are about to journey to a wonderful past...to biblical times, when the music
of Moses and the Prophets, David and the Psalmists, Solomon and Hezekiah, Mordechai and Esther, Nehemiah and Esther,
was still being performed.
This "classical" music of the Temple (which existed side-by-side with the "folk" music of the
Synagogue in Jesus' day) has been preserved in the Hebrew Bible (Masoretic Text) used today, and revived in modern
arrangements after nearly two millennia of obscurity and speculation. |
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This music is preserved in special "musical accents" (te`amim), written above and below the
Hebrew consonants. They are interspersed among the "vowel-points", which likewise are found above and
below the Hebrew consonants.
The following rows contain the first line of Psalm 29 from the Letteris Edition (including the title: mizmor ledavid or "A Psalm of David"),
first given with the accents and vowel-points, then with the accents only: |
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The te`amim
used in the above examples are taken from the "psalmodic system", which is found in Psalms, Proverbs and the body of Job. The related "prosodic system" is found in the prologue and epilogue
of Job and in all the other books of the Hebrew Bible. All the verses of Hebrew Scripture (including the Psalm
titles and words such as "selah")
are annotated with these musical accents. Altogether, there are nineteen graphemes (graphic accent forms) used in printed editions of the Hebrew Bible, some of which are found
both above and below the words (and therefore represent more than one musical value each). |
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The written signs themselves are but transcriptions of gestures made by the hands and/or fingers. The sublinear signs (those found below
the words) apparently transcribe gestures made by the left hand; the superlinear
signs (those found above the words), gestures
made by the right hand. In most synagogue
communities, however, only one hand is
used to make gestures -- a point to which we shall return...
Both the gestures and the written signs are called te`amim (from ta`am, to taste,
discern, appreciate), because they are meant to help the reader or hearer of Hebrew Scripture discern
and appreciate the sense of the often-ambiguous Hebrew words. In effect, the
melody defined by the te`amim conveys
and even magnifies the vocal inflection, rhythm, grammar, etc. of the words, thus making clear "how the Bible says what it says".
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Such is what Jewish history and tradition testify to us about the significance of the te`amim. These
signs are all the more relevant in that they and the accompanying vowel-points were not written in the Torah scrolls read in the synagogue (see left). Rather,
the reader prepared himself beforehand using special codices (called humashim) in which the accents and vowel-points were placed
in ther proper positions relative to each other and to the words. |
What then of the accents' meaning? Here
is where the shoe pinches, hard...for
each synagogue community (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Babylonian, Yemenite, Persian, etc.) applies a different melodic
interpretation to them. Moreover, none of these musical interpretations explain the most obvious physical features
of the written signs -- namely, their forms, their placements above or below the words, their positions relative
to a syllable (the nuances of which are often suppressed in manuscripts and even printed editions), and their particular
orders within a verse or phrase. Finally, none of the synagogue communities seem to have preserved the original
gestural system behind the written signs intact (at least in practice), though many ancient communities have each
its own gestural system.
These latter-day musical interpretations are attached by various means to a sort of "deciphering key"
created by the scribes who preserved the notation (the Masoretes) and their grammarian successors. This "key"
starts from the premise that the accents are primarily
a means of dividing or connecting words within a phrase, secondarily a musical notation. The conclusions which result from this premise share the same essential
faults as do the melodic interpretations attached to them. For this reason, a minority of scholars (since at least
the Renaissance) have maintained that the original musical meaning of the accents was lost.
How then was the musical notation preserved when its original meaning was not -- and how was that original meaning
rediscovered? Therein lies one of the most fascinating, yet still underappreciated tales in biblical, musical and
historical scholarship... |
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