Cantillation Signs

Cantillation is the particular ritual chanting of readings from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services.

The chants are composed and notated in accordance with the specific indications or marks printed within the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh) to fit the letters as well as vowel points.

These types of marks are known in English as accents and in Hebrew as ta`amei ha-mikra or just te`amim . (A few of these signs had been also sometimes utilized in middle ages manuscripts of the Mishnah.)

Figure 8: Cantillation signs, 1

The actual musical motifs linked to the signs are usually recognized in Hebrew as niggun and in Yiddish as trope is usually used in English with the same meaning.

A primary purpose of the cantillation signs is to advice the chanting of the holy texts during community worship. Fairly approximately speaking, each and every word of text has a cantillation mark at its main accent and associated with that mark is a musical phrase that tells how you can sing that word. The truth is more complicated, with a few words having two or even simply no marks and the musical meaning of some marks dependent upon framework. There are various sets of musical phrases associated with various parts of the Bible. The music differs with various Jewish traditions and personal cantorial styles.

Figure 9: Cantillation signs, 2

There's a couple of methods of cantillation marks within the Tanakh. One is used in the twenty-one prose books, whilst the other shows up in the three poetical books of Psalms , Proverbs and Job . Except where otherwise stated, this method explains the ``prose'' system.

A few old manuscripts of the Mishnah consist of cantillation marks similar to those in the Bible. There's really no surviving system for the musical rendition of those, there is often a traditional intonation utilized in study regarding Mishnah or Talmud, relatively like an Arabic maqam , however this is not reduced to some exact system such as that for the Biblical books. Recordings have been created for Israeli national archives, and Frank Alvarez-Pereyre has got published a book-length research of the Syrian tradition on the basis of these types of recordings.

Figure 10: Cantillation signs, 3