Feature article from 'Communicating Voice'
By Gordon Stewart
Phonetics and the Singing Voice
It
gives me some hope that the Greek alphabet contains some letters, which are used
in the international phonetics alphabet. There is a chance that
will give me a starting point when I go to spend four days in
Greece to share my thoughts with singers as they think about Europe’s mainstream
classical repertoire.
Phonetic symbols are a major tool in helping those of us who sing to represent those parts of music which are only partly musical - the pronunciation that gives our repertoire its characteristic, national cultural voice. Nationality, not nationalism, is the aim, and it's achieved even when composers adopt another language for commercial reasons - Mozart, Hasse and Handel and all the other northerners who set Italian words with an ear for their sound can be said to become Italian for the time it took. (Something I don't think Benjamin Britten did when he set words by Michelangelo or Rimbaud - but Britten was after other things in those cases.)
The phonetics most of us deal with are inevitably a somewhat
blunt tool: my venerable Harrap's French dictionary, in its pre-war
editorial, talks even then about the difficulty of representing an
intermediate sound when neither
nor
is quite right, and my equally venerable Collins German dictionary
takes Bühnendeutsch as its standard, though the German spoken now on
German stages and in German films is somewhat different. The idea,
floated by a noted singing teacher in London, that the "best German"
is sung by the Americans and the British seems to me to be begging a
question or two, one of which is what we think we are doing when we
turn speech into song.
Nevertheless, though you take the risk of sounding a little stilted with your IPA-approved enunciation, you almost certainly get much closer than if you try to make over your own natural vowels, with your local consonants hanging on to them, into another language. It's a starting point but there is no substitute for listening: language changes, and so does pronunciation: when I hear tapes of speech broadcasts I did some twenty years ago I cringe at the poshness of my speech patterns. The French, whom I listen to on France Inter, the only European radio I can get with any clarity on my mobile radio, are audibly changing too, in spite of the efforts of their Académie - how do you pronounce email?
There's less distinction now in sound between the future and the conditional tenses when you talk about yourself, presumably not because nowadays we feel more conditional about the future. What is meant is clear from the context: what you expect at the end of Duparc's Chanson triste, with its promise of a cure for love, is part of a very definite future, and not conditional on anything except, perhaps, patience.
So phonetics for singers, while going nowhere near the accuracy that the specialists approach and which therapists have to learn for their work, are an important step on the way to making poetry and music join up - for the sake of an audience, and even more for the performers themselves. Music is an international language until you put words to it. Discuss.
Gordon Stewart, formerly Head of the Voice Department at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, trained as a singer and a pianist at the Royal College of Music, he writes, reviews books on singing, teaches and has an interest in vocal music and the speaking voice.