User:Matthewdahlitz/Musical Transliteration

Musical Transliteration is a compositional technique whereby a series of notes are generated in direct correlation with a corresponding text. The resulting row of notes is then the basis for composing melody just as a Twelve-tone row is used as a basis for an atonal composition. If the row is used in the exact sequence it has been generated by the text then it is called a 'Linear Transliteration'.

The name 'musical transliteration' has been coined by Australian composer Matthew Dahlitz (ref needed) and utilised in some of his orchestral transliterations of ancient Hebrew texts (ref needed). His work follows musical transliteration efforts by Uri Harel, from the Center For Biblical Hebrew, and the composers and recording artists who have worked on Uri's "Music From God" project.

Musical Transliteration Method

The following describes a linear transliteration method to translate Hebrew into music: The transliteration process starts with a matrix of scales and modes that match up with the Hebrew alphabet. From this matrix a ‘translation’ the original text into musical notes is created. This is akin to the 'row' that is generated in the twelve-tone technique used to compose atonal compositions. For example, if I take the C major scale, and assign the letter A to the note C, the letter B to the note D, the letter C to the note E, and so on, I’ll have a map to translate words into melody. Using this example then, the word “Believe” would become the musical melody D-G-G-C-G-C-G. We get repeated notes like the G because the letter e and l happen to line up with G in the repeating 7 note scale that’s put up against our 26 letters of the alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet (by the way the first two letters of Hebrew are Alpha-Beth) is neatly broken up into three block of 9. From Aleph to Teth is the numbers 1-9, from Yod to Tzadi is the numbers 10-90, and Qoph to the Tzadi sofit (ending letter) is the numbers 100-900. (insert diagram to illustrate) The most basic way to assign musical notes to this alphabet is to start the scale and the alphabet together and just repeat the scale at the 8th letter, 15th letter, and so on. However there is another way of interpretation by combining modes into 9 note scales and assigning the scale to each of the three ‘blocks’ of alphabet. This way the tonic note is always assigned to 1 Aleph, 10 Yod, and 100 Qoph, the second note of the scale is always assigned to 2 Beth, 20 Kaph, 200 Resh, and so on. It does stretch the tonality a bit from a single mode, but makes for some interesting possibilities. (insert diagram to illustrate) Another variant on assigning notes is the linear retrograde method. This is assigning the scale to the alphabet but ‘spelling’ the scale backwards (in retrograde). Once the composer has decided what method and what scales or modes he or she is going to use, a map of the text to notes is generated (often as a MIDI file or computer generated print out). There is software that automatically assigns notes to the Hebrew letters according to the note ‘map’, and to whatever part of the text is chosen. Although this could be done manually, it would be very time consuming and the use of software designed for this task is utilised. Once the composer has a string of notes, it is then time to actually make musical sense out of it and compose something. For this ‘Linear Transliteration’ method the string of notes are kept in order, sometimes using adjacent groups of notes as chord, but mostly developing a melody either for one voice or a number of voices. There can be a lot of repeated notes with this technique, so using a few voices in counterpart is a very useful technique to pull out some beautiful lines without compromising the integrity of the linear method.