מסורות המקרא על־הפה / Tradition(s) of Reading, On-the-Mouth [ or: What are the טעמים ? ]

[Easton Houle]

Besides my work in quantitative musicology on the te'amim, I also revel in practical experimentation:  such as  trying combinations of aspects between various traditions, and integrating features of reconstructed Hebrew pronunciatuon from historical linguistics.

To be specific: I do not mean that I mix together melodies.  Different rites do not perceive the te 'amim all in the same way.  

Each rite has emphasized a different aspect of the te'amim and regulated (and apparently conserved) that aspect very tightly while allowing other aspects to vary.

Thus, if I ask traditionally trained Jews to tell me what the te'amim are, and what they do, I will get rather different answers depending on who I ask:

Maybe...

...an Ashkenazi Jew would tell me:  

Te'amim are for stress.

... a Sephardi Jew would tell me:

Te'amim are for phrasing.

... a Teimani Jew would tell me:

Te'amim are for rhythm.

... and practitioners of rites close to, at the edge of, and outside of, those labels would likely give answers that are close to one or that are intermediate between two of these answers...

Moreover, scholars of the text may say that...

Te'amim are quasi-accentual and fully punctuational.

Te'amim are quasi-syntactic and fully prosodic.

There will even be academic debate over how literacy-based vs. orality-based they are...

...and whether they are or are not organized dichotomously.

...and each of these practitioners and scholars would be right, in each their respective sense!

Yet, with a step back, and a panoramic view of all traditions and academic theories, the te'amim encompass all of these things. And it would help us in fully understanding the sense of the Hebrew text, to share a feeling for each of the different perspectives and to reconcile over their disagreements.

I will attach and link a brief example of my own recitation that provides an example of these aspects at play at once, as a conversation-starter. 

Please expect it to not sound like what you grew up with.

This is a recitation informed by a comparative study of many different rites, and I have attempted to settled on a middle-ground between various rites for each aspect that the notation governs.

There is not just one way to go about this, either. So the way in which I attempt to highlight features of one or more traditions at a given time is up to negotiation, elaboration, and correction.

Amos 1:1-2 te'amim syncreticly recited

דִּבְרֵ֣י  עָמ֔וֹס        אֲשֶׁר־הָיָ֥ה  בַנֹּקְדִ֖ים    מִתְּק֑וֹעַ

אֲשֶׁר֩  חָזָ֨ה  עַל־יִשְׂרָאֵ֜ל    בִּימֵ֣י ׀  עֻזִיָּ֣ה  מֶֽלֶךְ־יְהוּדָ֗ה

וּבִימֵ֞י        יָרָבְעָ֤ם  בֶּן־יוֹאָשׁ֙    מֶ֣לֶךְ  יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל

שְׁנָתַ֖יִם    לִפְנֵ֥י  הָרָֽעַשׁ ׃      וַיֹּאמַ֓ר ׀

יְהוָה֙    מִצִיּ֣וֹן  יִשְׁאָ֔ג        וּמִירוּשָׁלִַ֖ם    יִתֵּ֣ן  קוֹל֑וֹ

וְאָֽבְלוּ֙    נְא֣וֹת  הָרֹעִ֔ים      וְיָבֵ֖שׁ    רֹ֥אשׁ  הַכַּרְמֶֽל  ׃

Sincerely,

Easton Houle, B.Sc.; graduate student researcher

Interdisciplinar

y statistical methods for Historical Musicology: 

a Phylo-geography of Hebrew Cantillation melodies

Bell Lab for Evolution ; Hendry Lab for Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics ; Larsson Lab for Palaeontology

Redpath Museum, McGill University, Canada

[Easton Y.K. Houle]

Hi, all! Thanks for accepting me into the group. I'm reposting this as a comment under my own thread to see if it sends to the group, since neither of my topics made it to my inbox.

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I'd like to share this abstract by Zara Fox and I for an upcoming conference on new approaches to World Music:

The Jewish notation and melodies used in the recitation of the Hebrew Bible (t’ame hamiqra) have long served fascinating analytical and musicological questions. The notation system is ubiquitous among global Jewish communities. It is ecphonetic, representing melodies that are orally transmitted, but organized textually. The transmission and evolution of these melodies, their degree of conservation across the centuries, and their relationships alongside

 the music of surrounding cultures, have been topics of high interest and contention in Jewish music scholarship for as long as it has existed. The complex variation between different branches of this tradition has challenged, yet ultimately deterred, musicologists from investigating ancestral relationships between them.

This project serves as the largest meta-analysis of Hebrew recitation melodies ever performed. We created a census of the English language literature on notated sources of cantillation melodies, and took thorough measurements of qualitative detail from >260 recitation traditions (i.e. the shape of the individual

 melodic cell assigned to a given Hebrew ecphonetic sign/ ta‘am by the given tradition). For >130 of these recitation traditions, in which there wasrepresentation in the sources of 20 analogous tones per tradition (onset and final tone of the same ten te‘amim), we took a quantitative measurement of each tone’s pitch in relation to the verse final. We then entered the qualitative characters into a cladistic analysis using the PHYLIP software developed by Joseph Felsenstein, a founder of modern phylogenetic inference. Purely based on melodic variation in the sources, the ‘family trees’ produced by this analysis reflect the history of Jewish migration over the past two millennia. Our measurements of pitch relations have also enabled us to identify specific derived features that associate closely-related traditions while setting them apart from more distantly-related groups, but also to identify deeply preserved features which conspicuously survive in populations on opposite sides of the Jewish world. 

With our interdisciplinary approaches (adapting models and methods from Evolutionary Biology) we are opening avenues of discovery and understanding that may well lead to a new chapter for not only Jewish musicology and cultural history, but for Historical Musicology as a whole.