The music of the Old Testament
In the coded manuscript of the 8th century Aleppo Codex and all subsequent editions of the Hebrew Bible, there are a number of signs above and below the text called cantillation signs. There meaning is disputed. They are in effect chironomy, or hand signals. I have written all the 935 chapters of the Scriptural text from tanach.us via a web service and a transcription program in Oracle PL/SQL, a set of files in MusicXML that are 100% derived from the Biblical Text and without any other manual intervention. Musescore can read these files and reveal the art-song that is the Scripture. It changes its meaning. The files are available from this page, http://meafar.blogspot.ca/p/music.html
Now I want to analyse the differing ways in which music is used by the artist of these songs to illustrate them.
Anyone who would like to develop accompaniments, approaches to performance and so on is welcome to use them. I have with others performed some liturgically and there are performances e.g. by Chanticleer, on the web.
Comments
My, the tropes have changed a lot over the centuries. Here's how we would sing it now (based purely on one of the files that you uploaded here, which included the Herbrew text with tropes):
In reply to My, the tropes have changed a by Isaac Weiss
I realize that the tropes are widely different. The advantage to the Vantoura reconstruction is that it is very simple. The sublinear accents provide the 'scale' (8 for the 21 books, 7 modal for the 3 books). The supralinear accents are the ornamentation. Traditional tropes are extremely melismatic and so obscure the grammatical and exegetical partitioning of the words of the text. I am very much a beginner in looking at tradition. I have looked only at Jacobson's 1000 page tome and at some 19th c work and a bit of de Hoop. I do find much explanation difficult to follow. The music of Vantoura's approach is quite transparent.
But thanks for the example. Tov!
In reply to I realize that the tropes are by Bob MacDonald1
I'll be amazed.