short takes

[cellio]

I'm working on typesetting and transliterating another Salamone Rossi piece for our SCA choir. I'm almost done with the music, and then I'll start on the text. I'm looking forward to singing this one. No, I'm not working from facsimiles; I wish I had copies of that. I have a modern edition that was published in France, and they transliterated the Hebrew in ways that undoubtedly make sense for French speakers, but (1) that set does not include me and (2) I have discovered errors in the transliterations (ones that have nothing to do with French vowels). So I'm redoing it, but the easiest way to do that is to typeset the music myself and then add lyrics. (Besides, the music typesetting in this book wouldn't cope easily with a couple more passes through a photocopier.)

It's funny: I'm using their transliteration to figure out what they probably meant, and then going back to the text (psalms, prayer book, etc) to get the actual Hebrew, and then transliterating that for the choir members who don't read Hebrew. Kind of round-about, but it works.


Saturday is (SCA) kingdom 12th night and it's nearby, so we'll be going (after I get home from Shabbat services). Sunday we are having a local 12th-night party, just down the road at CMU. The latter is free and pot-luck food, so tonight I made a couple of cheese/onion tarts to take because I don't want to deal with it late Saturday night. I want to bring something that can be served cold and that doesn't require me to provide non-disposable containers and utensils, so I don't have to deal with kashrut issues. So much as I would have otherwise made something more substantial (maybe even meat), I don't want to deal with trying to take my crock pot to keep something warm. Too much risk of contamination.

Saturday night dagonell and Cigfran will be crashing with us. It'll be nice to see them again. They get to inaugurate the new version of the guest room.


The cable reception is much better with the fancy digital setup than with what we had before. We watched West Wing tonight (from tape, obviously) and the picture was crisp and clear -- best I've seen from a videotape on this TV so far. But I still don't think it's worth an extra $35 a month. We just don't watch that much TV.

The DVD is still AWOL. I sent half.com a polite letter of complaint today for their part in this; I wonder if I will get a reply.

Comments

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

Yay! Salamone Rossi Hebreo is one of my favorite old Jewish composers! (I think I even listed him on one of my interest lists.) Somewhere around here, I have a CD of people doing some of his redacted work. Want me to see if I can find it for you?

[cellio]

I have a CD too (that's how I first became aware of him). I'll have to look and see who the performers are, to see if we're talking about the same recording.

I'd love to find copies of the manuscripts so I could try my hand at redacting them myself. The liner notes in the CD described his approach to the problem of right-to-left Hebrew and left-to-right music, and I'm curious whether it works any better in practice than I think it does from the description. :-)

[marnen.livejournal.com]

Cool! How did Rossi deal with the text-direction problem?

Years ago, I saw a song with Persian text. This particular edition dealt with the directional issue by just notating the *music* from right to left!

[cellio]

I wrote pseudo-music, right to left, above the words of my haftarah, since you don't have to memorize the music for that one and I needed the hints. (We weren't taught the full trope system; we got tapes.) If I could make my music software go right-to-left meaningfully, I'd try to import Hebrew fonts and do it right. :-) (This wouldn't help my choir, but it would be fun to play with in other contexts.)

Rossi wrote the music left to right. He then wrote the words left to right, but wrote each word (correctly) right to left -- so each word was centered under its corresponding music (leading to wiggle room, and thus variation, in matching notes to syllables), and each word was correct but you read the words "backwards". Or so claimed the liner notes for a CD of his music (which I forgot to look up details on at home).

[jeannegrrl.livejournal.com]

I'm working on typesetting and transliterating another Salamone Rossi piece for our SCA choir

Which one are you doing? I have several psalms (admittedly on less than perfect xeroxs). If I have one that you have, maybe I can send a copy and make your job a little easier?

[cellio]

I'm currently doing Hashkiveinu, and will be using a siddur for reference. (The test is a little different from what we're used to, I think, but it's all in there.) I've marked a few other pieces for future work that are based on psalms (or prophets, in at least one case), and would welcome readable copies of the Hebrew to work with! (Let me check on which texts they are.) Dani has a Hebrew-language bible, but it's very very small print and in very bad condition, so I don't really want to open it flat on a photocopier to enlarge the text. The spine is falling apart. I did Halleluyah Halleli (psalm 146) from that book, using a magnifying glass and a great deal of time, and I will find a better solution next time. (I found a web site that had the text without vowel pointing, but I kind of need that...)

[jeannegrrl.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm not sure if I have Haskiveinu. But I have a recording ZemerChai performing Halleluya Halleli Nafshi if you're interested in giving it a listen - it's from our 25th anniversary concert concert. The quality's not the best since it's over the web (and even so, the file is really big - 2.5MB) but I thought you might enjoy it. :-)

http://www.jeannegrrl.com/audio/HalleliNafshi.mp3

In the meantime, I'll see if I can dig up Haskiveinu.

[fiannaharpar.livejournal.com]

We should record how it sounds with the BMDL choir or OTM. It sounded amazing both times.

I still need to memorize the ending halleluyas.

[fiannaharpar.livejournal.com]

The recording is just fine, you could hear each part clearly (I always listen for our "bayom ha hu" to see how audible the alto part is). The blend is very good, and the voices are nice and clear.

The timing on this recording sounds different from the way that we do it. cellio, am I hallucinating or remembering differently or something? The end just sounds more drawn out than we do it, but the tempo seems similar. Odd.

[cellio]

That sounds great! I'm sure the better speakers at home will reveal more detail; I don't want to turn the volume up too loud here at work.

Fianna, it sounds like they did a ritarde for about the lsat 3 measures or so, but otherwise the pacing sounds steady to me (and about the same speed we do it).

I didn't listen carefully (yet) for syllable placement; I know that the recording I have and the sheet music I have do not exactly match with what syllables go with what notes. It's a decision that has to be made by the transcriber, and apparently there are at least two editions out there somewhere. I remember noticing only minor differences, nothing major, but it threw me a bit when we started doing it and I noticed. (This is another reason I would like to have Rossi's manuscript -- to see for myself rather than only through other interpreters.)

[fiannaharpar.livejournal.com]

I'm all excited to hear it!

*bounce*

[cellio]

It's pretty. It's mellower than Halleluyah Halleli, and has some nice voice-leading and interplay between lines. It doesn't look hard, though, and there's a lot of homophonic motion. It alternates sections between 3/4 time and cut time.

It has two tenor lines, so I initially flagged this as "nice but we don't have part coverage", but now we do, and I have the text easily to hand (unlike the other piece I was considering, which was in four parts and text from Isaiah), so I decided to just go with this. If Ray doesn't like this one, I'll set it aside and do the other.