About קריאת התורהCantillation, also known as leyning or קריאת התורה, is the art of chanting the Hebrew Bible. For more than a millennium, Jews have been chanting the Torah according to a standard set of symbols which serve as both punctuation and as musical notation. While the symbols are the same across the world, the way that those symbols are vocalized varies in different Jewish communities, which developed their own liturgical traditions (nuscha'ot) over the past thousand years.
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This Site |
This site is a collection of several of these different liturgical traditions, complete with recordings of the ta'amim themselves, exercises of different common combinations of ta'amim, and excerpts from the Bible read according to each of the different traditions. Within each nusach, there are several different ways of vocalizing cantillation notes, each of which corresponds to a different text. This site contains, many, but certainly not all, of the different vocalizations of ta'amim across various communities.
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Exercises and
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While each ta'am, or cantillation note, is associated with a specific sequence of musical notes associated with it, that sequence may occasionally vary, even within a tradition, based an a number of factors, such as the surrounding ta'amim or the number of syllables in a given word. Therefore, this site includes exercises of common combinations of ta'amim, which illustrate how different ta'amim are vocalized based on context. They are grouped according to different "dominant" ta'amim (the cantillation notes which conclude phrases). In addition, the site includes examples, which demonstrate how different ta'amim are vocalized in the context of real Biblical readings, when ta'amim correspond with words of different length and in different contexts.
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Names of Ta'amim |
While both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewry use the same symbols for the ta'amim, they have slightly different names for those symbols. However, those names to not vary within different Sephardic or Ashkenazic traditions (even though their vocalizations do).
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