Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Vincent asked:-

>pretend a bright student throws you these curve balls. how would you
>respond?
>
>(1) if there is no metre or musicality of any kind in hebrew poetry,
>what's the basis of the liturgical chant? further, if there is no poetry,
>why is there a *second* system of chant for the three books job, proverbs
>and psalms (less articulated, yet more sensitive to syllables)?
>
>(2) what is the value of metre in any case? does it make a difference
>exegetically? could it make a difference in any way? who cares?

I'll have a go at the first half of the first question. (What does
musicality mean in relation to words not sung?) It is not
necessary to have a regular meter to be able to set words to music
or to develop a chant. All one needs to know is where the accents
lie. Take the opening tenor recititive from the Messiah by Handel.
He's set it to music on the assumption the accents run like this
(I'm not going to do the repeats so this is the first time a
phrase appears):-

COM-fort ye COM-fort YE my PEO-ple
SPEAK ye COM-fort-ab-ly TO je-RU-sa-lem
and CRY un-to HER that her WAR-fare

and so on.

To my ear there is no obvious metre in here, yet Handel has
nicely set it to music. (As an aside there are a number of places
in the Messiah where it is obvious that Handel thinks English is
like Italian and does some things which are unsingable, but
this isn't one of them.)

What it takes is a sensitivity to natural flow of the words. There
are plenty of people in this world who claim they cannot hear the
difference between an accented and an unaccented syllable. But
there are plenty of people who can. For a number
of years I sang with a choir specializing in Medival and Renaissance
music and I was cantor when we performed Gregorian Chant. Some of this
is just Biblical passages in Latin, prose without meter. Yet we (and I)
had no problem with the accentual irregularity of the words.

I have only once been to a synagogue, to a Bar-Mitzvah, so you shouldn't
read to much into what I say, but it appeared to me that the chanting of
the various passages which the boy had to recite from memory was not a
regular meter type chant. If I remember correctly he recited Genesis 1
to 6 and three chapters from 1 Samuel.

So in summary when without regular meter go with the natural flow of
the words.

Bill Rea, Information Technology Dept., Canterbury  University  \_
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