I am my beloved's....
Apr. 7th, 2007 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuToday I had the opportunity to chant the second half of the Song of Songs for the congregation. It was my first time chanting one of the three "festive megillot" and it went pretty well. One congregant, whose opinion I value highly, complimented me afterwards on my "lyrical" rendition.
For those not familiar with Jewish cantilation practice, the text is marked up with neumes, each of which represents a musical figure. The exact notes that correspond to a given neume depends on what kind of text it is, what the occasion is, and where one's ancestors are from. But, like a "handwriting" font that attempts to make entire words by having letters whose edges line up, the neumes are supposed to be seamlessly stitched together to form a musical representation of the text. And, like that "handwriting" font, if you simply apply the notes mechanically you'll get something that is technically correct but ugly --- you need to modify the noteforms to account for the neumes preceding and following, the meaning of the text, and one's natural human variability. Only then do you get a proper cantilation, just as true handwriting is far more expressive than what a "handwriting font" can produce.
They switched books on me, though. I was expecting to read it out of the Koren Tanach, which has splendid, clear typography. But instead the fellow who read the first half was given a different Tanach, which has horrible typography. (I think it's inspired by the Simanim series but is actually put out by a different company.)
First of all, it changes font sizes in the middle of a word to indicate the location of the stressed syllable. Second, it drops font sizes occasionally if the sentence stress is earlier than you would expect. And because of these things, and the overall large font size but narrow text block, there are occasionally really large gaps between words.
They add in special marks for the sh'va na and qamatz qatan vowels, except that their rules for sh'va na are not the same as what I learned, so I had to turn off the part of my brain that recognized them.
All in Frank Ruehl, which is an ok font but to my eye doesn't have enough variation in stroke width to be highly legible in a difficult reading situation.
So it was stressful -- I kept feeling like I was fighting the book -- but apparently I was able to convey the beauty of this extraordinary text. It was a privilege to sing it. Perhaps I'll sign up to chant Ruth in six weeks and two days....
For those not familiar with Jewish cantilation practice, the text is marked up with neumes, each of which represents a musical figure. The exact notes that correspond to a given neume depends on what kind of text it is, what the occasion is, and where one's ancestors are from. But, like a "handwriting" font that attempts to make entire words by having letters whose edges line up, the neumes are supposed to be seamlessly stitched together to form a musical representation of the text. And, like that "handwriting" font, if you simply apply the notes mechanically you'll get something that is technically correct but ugly --- you need to modify the noteforms to account for the neumes preceding and following, the meaning of the text, and one's natural human variability. Only then do you get a proper cantilation, just as true handwriting is far more expressive than what a "handwriting font" can produce.
They switched books on me, though. I was expecting to read it out of the Koren Tanach, which has splendid, clear typography. But instead the fellow who read the first half was given a different Tanach, which has horrible typography. (I think it's inspired by the Simanim series but is actually put out by a different company.)
First of all, it changes font sizes in the middle of a word to indicate the location of the stressed syllable. Second, it drops font sizes occasionally if the sentence stress is earlier than you would expect. And because of these things, and the overall large font size but narrow text block, there are occasionally really large gaps between words.
They add in special marks for the sh'va na and qamatz qatan vowels, except that their rules for sh'va na are not the same as what I learned, so I had to turn off the part of my brain that recognized them.
All in Frank Ruehl, which is an ok font but to my eye doesn't have enough variation in stroke width to be highly legible in a difficult reading situation.
So it was stressful -- I kept feeling like I was fighting the book -- but apparently I was able to convey the beauty of this extraordinary text. It was a privilege to sing it. Perhaps I'll sign up to chant Ruth in six weeks and two days....
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Date: 2007-04-08 04:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-08 05:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-11 08:16 pm (UTC)You really like the Koren that much? At my shul, we use the Koren tanach for Haftarot, and people are always getting confused between dalets and reishes.
"Neumes", eh? My old reliable 2-volume Funk & Wagnalls dictionary says (and m-w.com agrees) that this word refers to symbols for Gregorian chants. Has the word come to have a broader meaning in some circles?
Be that as it may, I would also mention that the neumes are not only musical notes, but also are a form of punctuation, indicating how a sentence is to be parsed. Unfortunately, many musically gifted readers don't understand this, and wind up beautifully chanting something like "Let's eat grandma." instead of "Let's eat, Grandma!"