cellio | Entries tagged with debatable choir

lrstrobel (Ray) is the director of our local SCA choir. He's out of town, so he asked Arianna (the former director) to run this week's practice. She got sent out of town for work, so she asked me to do it.

It was an amazing choir practice. We kicked butt. We sang Halleluyah Halleli perfectly, and proceeded to ace O Morte Eterno Fin. The pseudo-Spanish in Dindirin wasn't even a minor speed bump. Egged on by this, we sight-read the five-part Byrd Gloria, well. Then we sight-read some new German piece Hilda brought that we'd never seen before. Then we went looking for something challenging.

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I like the web. I don't love the web today, because it only gave me part of what I was looking for, but I still like it.

Our choir is going to do one of the Salamone Rossi pieces from a book I bought recently. I'm re-typesetting the music, though, mainly so I can redo the transliteration. I'm sure the transliteration in the book is perfectly intuitive for a French speaker (it's a French edition), but it's not intuitive to us. And people are intimidated enough by Hebrew without that complication, and I don't want them to be intimidated by Hebrew.

So the problem is that I have this French transliteration, and another ("English") transliteration in a CD booklet, and I can of course listen to the CD. But I'd rather work from the original Hebrew, which I don't quite have. But this particular text is a psalm setting, so I can get that, in theory.

So I searched the web for "psalm 146 Hebrew text" and got a useful hit here. It's a score, but it's not a complete score because it's missing the vowels. (The site's main page is here.)

(Dani actually has a Hebrew-language bible with really teeny tiny type. I wanted to avoid working from that copy as my baseline, but I think I can use it and a good magnifying glass to fill in the vowels on the copy I printed from the web.)

And then, I can do my own transliteration without any risk of compounding someone else's ambiguous Ashkenazi-inspired interpretation, thank you very much. :-)

Current Mood: satisfied

The Salamone Rossi music collections I ordered arrived today. This will be nifty to explore. I love Rossi's liturgical music and am looking forward to singing some of it.

There were some surprises, though. First, I thought (from the catalog description) that I was ordering two books that together make up the set of liturgical music called "Songs of Solomon". (There are 33 pieces in the collection, according to the recordings I have.)

What I actually ended up with was one book containing 30 of these pieces (haven't gone through to identify the missing ones yet) and a book of his *madrigals*. The madrigals are in Italian, not Hebrew, and there are no translations. I'm sure they're musically lovely; I'd like to know what they say. I'm not unhappy to have the music -- more Rossi is good! -- but I'm a bit puzzled by what I'm holding.

The other surprise, though, is that these appear to be reprints of editions originally written in *French*. So while the music itself has transliterated Hebrew (not actual Hebrew), the transliterations have occasional funky accent marks and things that are presumably meaningful to speakers of French. (I can fix this because I know what the texts should be, but I'll probably have to re-type pieces that the choir is going to do.) The other effect of the French edition is that there is a long introduction to the book, including a discussion of notation and (I suspect) a discussion of decisions made by the transcribers, which I would very much like to read, and *it's* in French, too. There are also two pages of material in Hebrew (almost certainly not the same text as the French), but sans vowels. (My odds of comprehension go from slim to very slim when you take away the vowels.) Dani should be able to puzzle that out for me, at least.

I'm still very happy to have the actual music -- or rather, some apparently-scholarly transcription of the music -- but I'm frustrated that I can't read the supporting materials. I'm a music geek; I actually read those parts of books.

Hey Fianna or Ray, how's your French? :-)

Monica

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Rossi music

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