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Judaism --> Cantillation |
Cantillation is the ritual chanting of
readings from the Bible in synagogue services.
The chant is rendered in accordance with the special
signs or marks printed in the Masoretic text of the
Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh) to complement the letters and
vowel points. These marks are known in English as
accents and in Hebrew as טעמי המקרא ta`amei ha-mikra
or just טעמים te`amim. (Some of these signs were also
sometimes used in medieval manuscripts of the
Mishnah.) The musical motifs associated with the signs
are known in Hebrew as niggun and in Yiddish as טראָפ
trop: the equivalent word trope is sometimes used in
English with the same meaning.
A primary purpose of the cantillation signs is to
guide the chanting of the sacred texts during public
worship. Very roughly speaking, each word of text has
a cantillation mark at its primary accent and
associated with that mark is a musical phrase that
tells how to sing that word. The reality is more
complex, with some words having two or no marks and
the musical meaning of some marks dependent upon
context. There are different sets of musical phrases
associated with different sections of the Bible. The
music varies with different Jewish traditions and
individual cantorial styles.
The cantillation signs also provide information on the
syntactical structure of the text and some say they
are a commentary on the text itself, highlighting
important ideas musically. The trope are not random
strings but follow a set and describable grammar. The
very word ta'am means "taste" or "sense", the point
being that the pauses and intonation denoted by the
accents (with or without formal musical rendition)
bring out the sense of the passage.
The current system of cantillation notes has its
historical roots in the Tiberian masorah. The
cantillation signs are included in Unicode as
characters 0591 through 05AF in the Hebrew alphabet
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