Why are there rising/falling tones in English-language chanting?
Upvote:1
Peter Harvey in an Introduction to Buddhism says of chanting
[chanting] has a rhythm which encourages the mind to flow from word to word [but ..] usually lacks melody which might encourage some words to become distorted
Also
chanting is neither singing or a monotonous dirge [...] it holds interest with it's minor variations of pitch and rhythm
So from this I would suggest that the tone of chanting is an aid to memory and interest and doesn't, in English, have a semantic content deriving from the original language. Of course Thai being a tonal language (i am not any kind of expert here) the tones may well have a more semantic content.
I guess less charitably you could say we are making it up a bit. Certainly from my own experience chanting within the Triratna community we have a tone they we vary widely from and add harmonies to on occasion. The the Padmasambhava chant we actually got the words wrong too initially (50 years ago) but we have just stuck to our original bad interpretation. We kind of like it.
Upvote:1
Thai chanting has a very distinctive rhythm and melody to it. The makers of that chanting book have simply replicated the Thai style to fit English. You couldn't do it exactly the same as the Pali because the lengths of words and sentences are different and the melodies sort of match up with the sentence boundaries.
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