Re: borrowed music

[Abbi Wood <acw24...>]

Just to add to Joel's message:

> We discussed this fellow some while back, for those that want additional
> information, see:
>
> http://www.shamash.org/listarchives/jewish-music/000323

There's also an article by Israel Adler, with facsimiles of the 2 Obadiah
MSS in the Cairo Genizah collections & info on Obadiah and the notation.
(The other manuscript is in the Cambridge University Library, UK). Sorry -
have lost my reference to the article. But it should be easy to track
down.

> I don't believe that the (Benedictine) neumes Ovadiah used are the same
> thing as the notation used for Gregorian chant. These pieces have been
> bewildering scholars for a long time. The recordings are conjectural,
> but/and interesting.

I think that the problem with interpreting the music is not with the
neumes themselves, but with which pitch levels they should be read at
(Adler discusses this). I saw the Cambridge MS recently, and it was pretty
easy to read the neumes & the text (and even to sing from them but they
seemed not to like that much in the Rare Books Room...) - but another
problem is that there are holes in the paper so there are bits missing. So
we will never know!

Abbi


---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+