Notes on haphtorah and torah cantillation pages

Following this link will take you to a page showing the common tropes for haphtorah cantillation, their musical notation and the tunes themselves as embedded sound files.

You can print the page off to refer to the musical notation, or you can play the notes live on your computer from the embedded sound files. Hopefully the advantage this may offer to some people is that it provides tunes commonly used in Britain.

About the tunes

The tunes are intended to represent the western Ashkenazi ones used nowadays in many British synagogues, although I gather that considerable variation is legitimate. Mostly they are from Jacklyn Chernett, and I am extremely grateful to her for providing them. However a few are influenced by those given in the Hertz chumash, which to my unmusical ear sometimes sounded more like what we usually hear in shul (most of the Hertz tunes do not). I also had some valuable input from Daniel Tunkel who runs the Jewish Music Distribution Company, for which I am also grateful. Since I first produced these notes Victor Tunkel has written a whole book on the subject: The Music of the Hebrew Bible: The Western Ashkenazic Tradition.

Jaclyn Chernett writes:

There is no exact meter and timings are approximate
Pashta is always over the last letter in its word
Zarka is always over the last letter in its word
Segol is always over the last letter in its word
Telisha ketana is always over the last letter in its word
Telisha gedola is always over the first letter in its word
Yetiv is always before the first in its word
All other ta'amim denote accented syllables

Daniel Tunkel gave me many helpful comments on an earlier version which I have now hopefully incorporated, but the following additional points seem worth reproducing:

Telisha ketana always precedes kadma, is a very unimportant non-pausal trop and needs to be studied in context of the various trop which surrounds it. Because the pattern of notes descends, many people think that telisha ketana is pausal: if you look at the sort of words on which it occurs, you can see that in fact this cannot be so, from the context of the Hebrew. But readers still put a lot of effort into the telisha ketana without realising that it is always joined to the very next word.
The reader needs to know how to tell yetiv apart from mahpach (the same symbol). There is a simple rule: mahpach is always followed by pashta, while yetiv is never followed by pashta.
No guidance is offered over what I call the misconception of the "double pashta". There is much that could be said about this, but in summary it is incorrect to construe this as a different trop from pashta simpliciter.
The second type of munach given in the Hertz is what is often referred to as legarmei, and occurs in a few uncommon places. It is nothing like as important a trop to know as the first munach. There are various other types of munach, for example that which comes between zarka and segol. (I have not included munach as a separate trop in the current version of the page - DC)

Lester Kershenbaum adds:

The statement you include about differentiating the machpach from the yetiv is "not quite" correct; there are at least two exceptions to this rule in the Torah cantillation: Leviticus 5:2 and Deuteronomy 1:4.

And I have this from Osher Posen:

I read with interest your statement "No guidance is offered over what I call the misconception of the "double pashta" quoted from Daniel Tunkel. You are correct in saying that many people misconstrue this as a completely separate note, which really irks me when I hear it. In fact I know "professional" teachers who lein like this. However the reason behind this note is simply to tell you that the stress is on the first part of the word, rather than the default end of the word as is commonly found in Hebrew. Rather than browse the pages online you can download this zip file which contains all the relevant files making up the pages. Then you can unzip it on your own computer and load the file from that without having to make an internet connection.

I hope people may find these pages of some use. There is a vast amount which I gather could be written on the subject, and indeed Daniel Tunkel is preparing a whole book on this. I would welcome any comments people have, and ultimately these may lead to the development of a more comprehensive treatment.

Torah cantillation

I have now obtained tunes for the common torah tropes from Jackie Chernett and have produced corresponding pages for them. The notes above should pretty much apply to the torah cantillation pages as well. Again, there seems to be a good deal of variability allowable in the tunes, and indeed in some cases you may prefer tunes similar to those provided for the haphtorah tropes.

Here are those links again:

Here is the page with embedded files for haphtorah
Here is the page with embedded files for torah
Here is the zip file - lets you set pages up on your own computer, recommended

Other sites

Here a few other sites which may be of interest

Dave Curtis 27/8/17 davenomiddlenamecurtis@gmail.com

http://www.davecurtis.net/dave.html