trope geekery

[cellio]

I'm chanting Torah for a women's service next month. Short chunk; 8 verses of parsha Emor. And I'm trying to learn the trope (cantillation melody) the right way, from the notation, rather than just parroting a tape recording. (I have a tape, in case this approach fails.)

The big difference between reading trope notation and reading regular music notation is that trope symbols are much more context-senstive. It's more like learning to pronounce an irregular language than like learning to read music.

There are 41 distinct phrase shapes. There are many fewer symbols than that -- I haven't counted, but order of 10. So you get things like "square thingy before wishbone thingy sounds like this, but square before sine wave sounds like this, but sine wave before double-dot sounds like this", and so on. (You may have figured out that I'm having trouble remembering the names of the marks. This is complicated by the fact that it appears the names change based on context too -- so a munach isn't always a munach, for instance.)

But I have a book, and said book contains a handy two-page spread with the symbols, trope names, and musical notation for all 41 problems, and this is fundamentally a pattern-matching problem. Put it in geekly terms and I can relate.

Friday I got together with a coworker for 20 minutes or so to go over what I've got so far. (Yes, I have a coworker who knows how to chant Torah, and she even volunteered to help me with this. The odds of that were fairly low.) I'm making good progress so far, and she pointed out a couple things that definitely help. (Certain symbols always go together, so you don't have to worry about variations for them.) It was interesting to see what happens when someone who reads trope but not music gets together with someone who reads music but not trope; we ended up using hand signals sometimes to indicate direction and distance, which actually worked out rather well. Actually doing certain hand signals when practicing is helping me.

(Aside: her trope is slightly different in places from what's in the book, which in turn is slightly different from what I've picked up from David (the reader at Tree of Life). But it seems to be style variations only, and she told me that what I'm doing is well within the scope of what she expects to hear.)

So I spent some of this afternoon pushing ahead a couple more verses, and I think I'm starting to get it. I didn't have to consult the book for every phrase -- though I haven't validated my work against the tape yet, either.

I didn't have the translation handy when I was doing this, but it seems I don't need it for broad strokes. I know enough words that, at least for this passage, I know what it's talking about without consulting a translation.

Book, passage, and tape are definitely going with me to Toronto for Pesach. Multi-day visits with relatives involve a lot of boring "between time", which I find kind of frustrating. Yes, I always take reading material, but that gets old. But this is something I need to work on and can do on my own, so it's perfect. I hope to be well into practicing from the real text (which doesn't have vowels or trope marks) by the end of Pesach.

And besides, that way if they don't let us back into the country or something because we visited SARS-land, at least I'm not completely hosed on this. :-)