Re: first annotated piece

[Francesco Spagnolo <yuval...>]

Ovadiah ha-ger (Ovadiah the Norman Proselyte; see Encyclopaedia 
Judaica entry) was born in Oppido Lucano, in Southern Italy, of 
Norman descent. He was a Benedictine monk. In 1104 (this makes it the 
XII century, as Judith correctly remembered) he followed the example 
of the Bari Archibischop whom, after witnessing a massacre of Jews in 
Otranto by the Crusaders, had converted to Judaism. He travelled 
around the Mediterranean and eventually reached Baghdad, where he 
studied and started writing a Siddur and an autobiography (which is 
the source of his biographical data).

Remember that Jewish communities in Southern Italy, especially 
Puglia, where Ovadiah lived, where then extremely populated and 
prosperous; Jews were expelled from Southern Italy at about the same 
time that they were expelled from Spain, since that part of Italy was 
then under Spanish rule.

Obadiah transcribed two piyyutim ("Barukh hagever" and "Waeda mah") 
in adiastematic (= no music lines; or plainchant) Benedectine neumns: 
they are written from right to left, following the Hebrew text, and 
the clef is marked with a "dalet" (which can be interpreted as both a 
D or an F -- depending whether "aleph" is A or C). Two scholars have 
provided modern trascriptions. One of them is Hanoch Avenary, whose 
transcription appears in the Enc. Judaica; the second one is Israel 
Adler, who might have gotten it right: according to him, the clef 
indicated an F, since in the case of it indicating a D, one of the 
two piyyutim would produce a "tritone" between its first and last 
note, an interval highly avoided (the Devil's interval) in Medieval 
music.

Francesco


>I'm losing track of who said what, but I think Robert said the first
>annotated piece of Jewish music is "from the 10th century, not the
>15th". Actually, in between. There's very little that's decipherable
>with any reliability of any western-notated music in the 10th century,
>Jewish or otherwise. What we have is a 12th (I think, maybe 13th but not
>15th anyway) century manuscript of a couple of piyyutim fragments, one
>of which has been recorded quite often, including by the Boston Camarata
>(with a mystifyingly medieval-church-y style accompaniment as I
>remember). These were transcribed (or who knows, maybe even composed) by
>a convert TO Judaism instead of the other way around, known as Ovadiah
>the Proselyte, and they are written in plainchant neumes - BACKWARDS, to
>accomodate the Hebrew script! The manuscript is problematic because of
>gaps, and the clef, and a etc. but Avenary at least published it. I use
>an overhead transparency of it soemtimes in lectures so people can see
>how the church neumes are used for the Hebrew writing.


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