The Music of the Hebrew Bible and the
Western Ashkenazic Chant Tradition

Yet even at that time these symbols merely codified the thousand-years-older traditional chanting of the Bible text.  And that in turn expressed the ancient understanding of the text, its punctuation, pronunciation and interpretation. 

What do these symbols mean?  Who invented them?  What did they mean by them?  Why are they placed where they are?  Why do they tell us about the meaning of the text?  What music do they convey? 

Through intense study over the centuries, scholars have tried to discern the varying functions of the symbols, their individual character, their relationship to words and meaning, their order of precedence, and the reasons for the patterns and sequences in which they occur.  This study is now greatly advanced by the computerising of the whole of the Hebrew Bible text.  We can see every occurrence of each symbol and sequence.  So it is at last possible for us to appreciate the rationality and sophistication of the underlying system, and its consistency.

As for the music, every Jewish community the world over has always chanted the text, giving tunes to the individual symbols.  The Jews of Central and Western Europe have had a complete set of tunes for the 27 prose symbols for at least the past thousand years, preserved entirely through oral tradition.  It is timely to set these tunes down as accurately as that oral tradition permits.  This book seeks to do this for the chant of the pre-eminent text, the Torah (Pentateuch); and then for the five other chants used for later Bible books or other occasions, while recognising that modern music notation cannot entirely capture the free and individual style of biblical chant.

Price £20 (softback)

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