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pianist, composer, conductor and musicologist

Season 2. July 2011 - June 2012. Number: 8, February 2012
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Dead Sea Scrolls and the Te'amim
Did you know that there exists a musical notation thousands years old? Did you know that the Psalms were (most probably) lyrics for songs and they have been notated? Did you know that a French lady Suzanne Haik-Ventoura deciphered them and she performed them? Read some search results on the topic... Listen to the music!...
A discovery in a cave by Bedouins changed the history in many fields including music and music-archeology...
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The archaic music notation discovered in those manuscripts are not "vague" but quite clearly defined instead...
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Dead_Sea_Caves_(425354131).jpgimage from Wikimedia
The caves of the discovery
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible found in the 1940s at Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea from which it derives its name.

The texts are of great mystical and historical significance, as they include the oldest known surviving copies and extra-biblical documents and preserve evidence of great diversity in late Second Temple Judaism. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, mostly on parchment, but with some written on papyrus. These manuscripts generally date between 150 BCE and 70 CE.

The scrolls are traditionally identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, though some recent interpretations have challenged this association and argue that the scrolls were penned by priests in Jerusalem, Zadokites, or other unknown Jewish groups.[3][4]

The Dead Sea Scrolls are traditionally divided into three groups: "Biblical" manuscripts (copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible), which comprise roughly 40% of the identified scrolls; "Apocryphal" or "Pseudepigraphical" manuscripts (known documents from the Second Temple Period like Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Sirach, non-canonical psalms, etc., that were not ultimately canonized in the Hebrew Bible), which comprise roughly 30% of the identified scrolls; and "Sectarian" manuscripts (previously unknown documents that speak to the rules and beliefs of a particular group or groups within greater Judaism) like the Community Rule, War Scroll, Pesher on Habakkuk (Hebrew pesher פשר = "Commentary"), and the Rule of the Blessing, which comprise roughly 30% of the identified scrolls.

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BoulezPollini2009.jpgimage from Wikimedia
The manuscript "Isae"
The significance of the scrolls relates in a large part to the field of textual criticism and how accurately the Bible has been transcribed over time. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible were Masoretic texts dating to 10th century CE such as the Aleppo Codex. The biblical manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls push that date back a millennium to the 2nd century BCE. Before this discovery, the earliest extant manuscripts of the Old Testament were in Greek in manuscripts such as Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 and Codex Sinaiticus.

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haik-vantoura1.jpgimage from http://www.rakkav.com
Madame Suzanne Haik-Vantura
Mme. Haïk-Vantoura (née Vantoura) was a composer, organist and music theoretician. Born in Paris, France in 1912, she entered the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique in Paris (CNSM) in 1931, and was awarded First Prize in Harmony (1934), First Prize in Fugue (1938), and Honorable Mention in Composition (1939). She became the student of the great organist and composer Marcel Dupré from 1941 to 1946, then devoted herself to music composition and teaching.

World War II interrupted her studies, and she fled with her family to southern France. While in hiding from the Nazis, then-Mlle. Vantoura first approached a problem that had intrigued her since childhood: the original meaning of the te`amim. By her account, she had learned in a French encyclopedia of music that these signs were ancient, musical and of unknown meaning. Given the lack of correlation between the melodies of the synagogue communities and the physical features of the notation itself, this appraisal was both plausible and objective -- and it became the starting point in Mlle. Vantoura's research.
Read more...
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Some interesting search results:

Dead Sea scrolls - CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science

http://creationwiki.org/Dead_Sea_scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are dated as far back as 3rd century before the common era  all the way to the 1st century of the common era. The scrolls are what contain some of the oldest biblical books we know of.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are made up of 900 pieces of writing, and were composed by a few different people or groups. We know of the Jewish sectarians, and that they wrote some. The Essene sect is also thought to have written some. The Essene sect was a group of Jews who left Judaism and moved to the desert. We also know that some of the Scrolls came from unknown sources as well.

Time Line of Early Christianity--The Lost Gospel of Judas--National Geographic

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/timeline_19.html
The Dead Sea scrolls are one of the greatest discoveries in archaeological history. The ancient texts first came to light in 1947, when a young goat herder stumbled upon some manuscripts hidden in a cave at Khirbat Qumran--about a dozen miles (19 kilometers) from the ancient West Bank city of Jericho.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation - Logos Bible Software

http://www.logos.com/product/8868/the-dead-sea-scrolls-a-new-translation
The Dead Sea Scrolls are not just for scholars anymore. They are here in a book that anyone can understand. Read these texts. Hidden in their caves, they survived the ravages of time and decay to speak to us today across two thousand years. They have survived their authors and will survive us, their readers.

Importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls | eHow.com

http://www.ehow.com/about_6607991_importance-dead-sea-scrolls.html
The Dead Sea Scrolls are most significant because they are the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible. Before the discovery of the Dead Seas Scrolls, the oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible was the Leningrad Codex, dating to 1008 CE. The documents that comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls, on the other hand, can be dated between 135 CE and 250 BCE, making these documents roughly 1,000 years older than any other copies in existence.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of thousands of documents written on parchment in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. While more than 800 of these documents are complete, or almost complete, there are tens of thousands of fragments. The documents in this collection include every book of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, except the book of Esther, as well as many unique works.

Dead Sea Scrolls ? fragments of history :: The Valley News

http://www.myvalleynews.com/story/24476/
The Dead Sea Scrolls are not only a significant archeological find, but are also of great spiritual importance to those of both the Jewish and Christian faiths. Twenty-seven scrolls, ten of which are on exhibit for the first time, are on display at the San Diego Museum of Natural History through the month of December. According to a museum employee, the scrolls had their own seats on an airplane ? and were flown from Israel highly guarded and shrouded in secrecy.

Evidence For The Bible -- The Dead Sea Scrolls | The Bridge to Grace

http://thebridgetograce.com/2010/10/16/dss/
The Great Isaiah Scroll  from the Dead Sea Scrolls are now housed in the Shrine of the Book Museum in Jerusalem with other Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible, while others are housed in numerous universities in the U.S. These scrolls prove to be the exact words that were written from before Jesus was born. Again, the only differences are misspellings, grammar and punctuation.

What were the dead sea scrolls? - Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101127054430AApUSUm
The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and extra-biblical documents and preserve evidence of great diversity in late Second Temple Judaism. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, mostly on parchment, but with some written on papyrus.These manuscripts generally date between 150 BCE and 70 CE.The scrolls are traditionally identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, though some recent interpretations have challenged this association and argue that the scrolls were penned by priests in Jerusalem, Zadokites, or other unknown Jewish groups.



The Music of the Bible Revealed: Numbers 6:22-27
Beautiful rendition of the music. Note the use of maqams and the drone pedal tones...Watch it on Youtube: click here...
image from Wikimedia
Articles
I recently published a paper on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Te'amim you can read it (pdf -2.2MB) here...
image from Wikimedia
Links
I recently created classicalvideos.net which is the one and only classical music video sharing site, please connect, publish, comment and share if you like.

J.S.BACH The Well Tempered Clavier  ~ J.S.Bach Art of Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge)




Mehmet Okonsar is a pianist-composer-conductor and musicologist. Besides his international concert carrier he is a prolific writer.  He is the founder of the first classical music-musicology dedicated blog site: "inventor-musicae" as well as the first classical-music video portal : http://www.classicalvideos.net. Mehmet Okonsar's official site: http://www.okonsar.com
Inspiration By Tzvi Freeman
There is nothing more bizarre: G-d tells us He despises idols -- and He wants us to despise them, as well. He says, "Don't even think of making idols. If idols come to your hands, burn them, destroy them, uproot them. Give your lives rather than give any credence to those idols."
Then, in the innermost chamber of His temple, the place He calls "Holy of Holies," there He tells us to make two golden figurines with wings, one a male, the other a female. [read more...]
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure. Russell Baker (1925 - )
 
 

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