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

[cellio]

This particular source is all in Hebrew AFAIK, but thanks for the information.