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Hi to you special friends who love language—

 

I had a rather startling experience this morning. In my doctoral project write-up, I said quite early on that recovering the music of the OT was impossible. My outside reader, Dr Roberta King, an ethnomusicologist at Fuller Seminary, wrote back and said, There is a French ethnomusicologist who attempted it and with considerable success.

 

Dr. King didn't tell me the Frenchwoman's name, but I tracked her down on Google. Suzanne Haik-Vantoura died in 2002, but not before she had spent her life deciphering the 20 te'amim (diacritical-like marks) found in the Masoretic and other OT versions. They are, she said, a system of musical notation, quite similar in some respects to that used in Gregorian chant, but uniquely tied to the Hebrew text and grammar.

 

Haik-Vantoura's conclusion was that the entire OT was notated to be sung, and this constituted, among other things, a kind of "fence" to guard the transmission and integrity of the text over the centuries.

 

There's a website that presents a National Public Radio (NPR) "Morning Edition" broadcast from 1986 with photos and illustrations that is fascinating in its own right:

 

The website has many additional pages, but this one seems to give the gist of Haik-Vantoura's work and its implications:

 

After listening to the music as presented in the NPR broadcast, I have to say that I'm impressed. At the very least. The result is stunningly beautiful. Beyond that, her work is reflective of some aspects of the Arabic makam system in music, in that the mode to be chosen in singing a passage was to be determined by the way the stress would fall on "important" words and ideas (some modes would produce entire the wrong emphasis). And the style of "conducting" that the symbols seem to indicate reminds me strongly of the many times I watched Greek Orthodox choirs being directed in their singing of the liturgy.

 

Anyway, if any of you has a thought on Haik-Vantoura's work, I'd be interested to hear it. At the very least, I'll need to re-phrase my own introduction to acknowledge her efforts as a possible solution to a 3000-year-old challenge. Not, I would guess, unlike the re-creation of ancient Hebrew itself as a living modern language.

 

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"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd