music transcription

[cellio]

Our choir is going to be doing a Salamone Rossi piece ("Hashkiveinu"). I have a modern edition of the music, but it has some problems:

• It's a French edition. Hebrew transliterated into French vowels is not very intuitive for our English-speaking choir.
• There are several errors in the transliteration.
• It's somewhat below the norms of legibility to which we have become accustomed.

So I've re-typeset the piece, but I don't have access to a facsimile of Rossi's manuscript. I'm using the modern edition as my primary guide, and consulting siddurim and a dictionary to resolve the occasional text question. (This process was greatly aided by lefkowitzga, who is rather more fluent in Hebrew than I am.)

I have one issue remaining. There is a place where the French edition says "ushvor satan mil'faneinu" [1]. "Ushvor" is in the verb position; the rest of the phrase is (loosely) "...impediment [or temptation] from before us". So you would expect a word like "remove".

"Ushvor" isn't a word, near as we can tell. The word "ushmor" is "guard"; if that's the intended word, then there's a word missing or something, because "guard impediment from before us" doesn't make sense. The siddur uses the word "[v']haseir", which does in fact mean "remove".

So I have three choices: (1) assume that "ushvor" really is what Rossi wrote and I just don't know what he meant; (2) assume the French transcriber made a one-character mistake, but with a word that doesn't really fit; or (3) assume that the transcriber just wrote the wrong word somehow and that Rossi really wrote "haseir".

I guess I will do what any good academic would do: choose my favorite (#3), and footnote it.

I'd love to find a facsimile of Rossi's manuscript! Failing that, I'd love to find a 16th-century Italian siddur, to at least see what text was commonly in use in his time. So far, though, I haven't been able to turn up either through the library.

[1] Actually, it says "...mil'fanecha" (from before you). This is one of those errors I was referring to.

Comments

[goljerp]

Failing that, I'd love to find a 16th-century Italian siddur, to at least see what text was commonly in use in his time.

Have you looked for a modern italian siddur? I think that they've managed to keep their prayers from being homogonized like many ashkenazic communities have. (I've only davened in Italian shuls a couple of times (once was the Italian shul in Jersualem), but they're rather proud of their tradition which is similar to the sephardic davening (but don't tell that to them or be prepared to hear a lecture about how theirs is older).)

[cellio]

That's a good idea! I wonder if I can turn one up. We don't seem to have that community locally; this will require some looking around.

[goljerp]

Just did a bit of resarch; apparently it's called "Nusakh Italki" or "minhag Bnei Roma" or "minhag Lo'azim". This was from a Sephardic site, which claims that Italian nusach is similar to ashkenazic. And take a look at the web site of the italian shul in Jerusalem.