Who's who in that setting?

Among the many things that a composer needs to think about when setting a text is the internal clues about who's singing what. If they get it wrong it may involve the audience and/or performers in some unnecessary mental gymnastics.

One example is That Lovely Weekend, which once  was a regular part of the repertoire for BYC's male-voice sub-choir. It starts "I haven't said Thanks for that lovely weekend" and the song recounts the two young lovers' doings on the weekend in question, followed by a tearful parting: "I'm sorry I cried, I just felt that way".

This was a song made popular by Vera Lynn in 1942 . It was a wartime song. The lovely weekend in question was – to use the British English – leave (short for 'leave of absence'); the American English equivalent would be furlough...

<parenthesis>

(a word that has a less recreational sense in British English in 2020...

<amuse-cervelle>

What English word is spelt with these consonants in this  order: CRNVRS and includes these vowels (in another order): OOAIU, but has nothing to do with respiratory infection?

</amuse-cervelle>

...If the usage trends graph provided by Collins extended beyond 2008 it might show an upturn starting in March 2020 rather than this faintly embarrassing ... 

<IknowIknow> 

(not that any document can ever be up to date – I just feel that with data at least 12 years out of date [and counting], they ought to 'fess up)

</IknowIknow> 

...slow dwindling:

) 

</parenthesis>

.... But in the setting that used to be in the repertoire of the Berkshire Youth Choir in the early noughties it featured a baritone and only male voices. Of course, the tearful man might have been a conscientious objector being visited by a Wren whose "kit to be packed" (lyrics courtesy of genius.com) included an evening dress, but – expecting (at the sound of galloping hooves) horses rather than zebras – I found it rather odd.

Similarly, but with the full forces of an SATB choir, I felt the version of "Goodnight Sweetheart" performed two or three times by Wokingham Choral Society under our one-time MD Alex Chaplin (and more often by the WCS Chamber Choir...

<plug>

(available at reasonable rates for weddings and bar mitzvahs)

</plug>

...) was inappropriately set. The socio-historic (rather than musical) setting was an American Graffiti sort of thing: an adolescent couple in a borrowed car outside the young lady's home at the end of a date:

sings the young ma... but no; it's the sopranos. I always felt confused at this stage (not that anyone in the audience would have shared my feeling.

That's all for today; things to do (even if it rains at Southampton :-)).

b

 

Update: 2020.08.26.12:25 – A few typo-fixes and other corrections

Singing in tongues

A few days ago my attention was caught by this tweet:

I did what I was told, and read this post. It's a fascinating field, but I was side-tracked by a digression prompted by these words...

When copying an accent in song turns out, it is all about the vowels. “Singing is all about vowels. Language is altogether is really [HD – sic; I suspect a hasty edit {you''ll know the sort of thing if you've read some of MY stuff}] vowels interrupted by consonants. Although there are things you have to be careful of when singing consonants generally it’s the vowels you have to be careful of.” Nail the vowels and you can nail the accent...

... particularly the word consonants. When you think about it – and you may have noticed that thinking about words is something I do – it does what it says (in a way often pleasing for the etymologically minded). Vowels could be regarded as 'sonants'  (not to be confused with sonorants – which really are A Thing in the world of phonetics [and I see that my made-up word sometimes is used like that {as here}, Aw shoot ...]). My point is that vowels are things produced by the vocal cords, or – to use my attempted, but misfired, neologism – 'sonants'. Con-sonants are things that just hold them together. If you think of an utterance as a stream, the water is the vowels; the consonants are the stepping stones.

<digression> 

Recently I was watching a French drama with subtitles. A subtitle read 'Have you had one?' I tried to recapture the original from my short-term memory, but failed; in my defence, it was late evening; earlier I'd've been  listening and not reading. It might have been (though I can't guarantee it)  Tu en a eu une? Hearing and making sense of that calls for quite some linguistic skill [and, for the non-Francophone, plenty of practice with the /y/ phoneme – on which, don‘t get me started]. After the elision of en a the only two consonant phonemes among all those vowels are /n/ (twice) after the initial /t/. 

</digression>

The idea of accents in singing reminded me of a concert I sang in  nearly thirty years ago.

<autobiographical note>

Our conductor was a very young Paul Daniel. About two weeks before the concert, he started feeling a pain in his shoulder. He kept rehearsing us until the very last Thursday rehearsal, so on the Saturday we turned up for the dress rehearsal fully expecting him to be there. 

But on the Friday he had seen a specialist who told him if he conducted us the following day he might do serious damage. So, at almost no notice, we had a deputy to conduct us. The choir's records are sketchy, for so long ago. Paul Daniel was with us for 3 years (that's twelve concerts, of which he missed one), and there are records here of only 2 of his concerts. But there is also this:

Brian Wright had driven down that morning from Yorkshire. And when we sang 

Praise ye

The God of Brass 

he winced. He had been used to northern choirs, and was not expecting our /ɑ:/. I wonder what vowel Walton had in mind.

</autobiographical note>

I have long felt that the life of a choral singer would be made simpler if music publishers adopted use of the IPA. Amateur choirs don‘t have the luxury of foreign language coaches – mentioned by the opera singer interviewed in Faking the Funk::

I’ve long thought that it was easier to sing in an accent that isn’t your own than it is to speak in a foreign accent. This turns out to be somewhat true according to Bill Beeman, a sociolinguist at University of Minnesota. Beeman also happens to be an opera singer. He speaks and sings in multiple languages: English, German, Italian, French and Russian. However, his accent in each of these languages is acctually better when he sings than when he speaks.  

“My accent when I’m singing is very carefully constructed and we use coaches when we’re singing in order to be able to produce the language as perfectly as possible,” he says. 

        <autobiographical_rant>

I don't think I've ever sung Fauré's lovely Cantique de Jean Racine  [ranted about here] without a more or less protracted argument – repeated in rehearsals – about the false liaison of très with haut. And I've sung it at least a dozen times [in concerts and other performances, that is; getting on for a hundred rehearsals. On one occasion it was a tenor [who doesn't even sing the words in question] who complained: "We sang it that way [HD: the 'thirteen waters' version^PS/PPSon tour in Belgium and had no complaints." GIVE ME STRENGTH!

</autobiographical_rant>

It would make the life of a choral singer much simpler, as I said. And each choir that cared about these things would only have to have one member, learning at the most a few dozen symbols. Besides so many amateur singers are language teachers (I wonder why...?) that the relevant expert would be readily to hand in most cases.

But I put it to a man at OUP who convinced me that it would cause so much upheaval (and cost publishers such a deal of money, I think he meant) that it just won't happen. But a chap can dream....

Enough dreaming though. There are words to be learnt for Saturday.

b
Update 2015.11.19.15.15 – Added PS 

PS A misericord (in the metaphorical sense introduced here): 'Thirteen waters' = treize eaux [geddit? the words that provoke the false liaison are très haut]

Update 2015.11.22.19.35 – Updated the Saturday link, so that it points to something useful a review.

Update 2016.04.16.20.20 – Added PPS and deleted obsolete footer.

Just back from this:

A good   day‘s sing. We sang the Cantique, and – true to form – there was a smattering of the thirteen waters version. Oh well – these things are sent to ... evoke clichés

Waiting around

<biographical_note theme="ho-ho-ho">
Last night I sang in my choir's carol service (and the ad at that link may have been superseded by next term's concert – in which case click on Past Concerts). And as usual, I regretted the line break before 'All in white...' at the end of Once in Royal David's City. In my (painfully RC) schools the line was unbending: the 'children' (the souls of the righteous) in the carol are 'crowned all in white'. In other words, they are sainted – and marked with haloes; which makes them look, from a distance, 'like stars' (Geddit?).

So when I sang carols anywhere but school, I insisted on joining the end of the penultimate line to the 'All in white', with a breath before 'shall wait around'; and found I was alone (when all my fellow singers with a schooling in the 'One True Church' had done the same). And the waiting around needn't detain us. In any case, the unfortunate vision – of juvenile delinquents hanging about on street corners – applies to both readings. The position of the breath (after 'crowned' or after 'white') affects only the colour of their hoodies. While 'wait around' is a phrasal verb in current English, it probably wasn't when the carol was written towards the end of the 19th century. I suspect the 'wait' has the sense of 'being available to serve'; and the 'around' is a simple preposition of place.

But this did not affect my enjoyment of the service, which was great fun to participate in and to listen to. And to rehearse. My favourite moment during rehearsals involved a private joke – private, that is, to people who have a bit of Latin.

We were singing an arrangement of In Dulci Jubilo that involved only half the choir singing the second verse and the other half joining in at the words Trahe me post te. As often happens when more people sing, there was a tendency to slow down. Our conductor said 'I feel as if I'm having to drag‡ you along after me.' This was my moment of private hilarity [little things...], as the words mean 'Drag me after you' (think of tractor on the one [Latin] hand and draught [animals] on the other [English].)

</biographical_note>

But my main object in writing is to 'fess up' to a few days' delay in the appearance of proofs of #WVGTbook. I spent last week proving the first law of software maintenance – the Law of Conservation of Bugs. This states that

In any development process, the fixing of one bug will generate at least one more, either by a bug in the fix itself or (more likely in these days of 'buddies', who keep an eye on this sort of thing) by exposing an underlying bug that was previously cloaked by the original bug.

In an earlier post, I rejoiced in the fact that Amazon's CreateSpace now accepts .doc files, which spared me the chore of getting to grips with Word 2010 (which supports .PDF as an output). Poor fool (or O me miserum as they used to say in Rome). I  might have guessed that the submission process still needed .PDF as an input, so their new acceptance of other formats meant that they would do the conversion behind my back.

So I submit a 'perfect' .doc file and they introduce a few dozen errors.† Then, working from their PDF file, I have to mutilate my .DOC file so as to produce something that, while looking a mess, will (one hopes) look OK after they've messed with it. So I fix a bad page-break and the fix itself causes several new mistakes further downstream. After my first submission, there were three notebook pages of errors. I fixed them, and after a second submission, there were three notebook pages of errors. I fixed them, and after a third submission, there were three notebook pages of errors. I fixed them, and after a fourth submission, there were (you've probably guessed it – I suspect you're beginning to detect a pattern here) three notebook pages of errors....  It seems to be a Sisyphean task.

I'll try once more with Word, but if that fails I'll have to find some way of producing a PDF directly. And that'll be after Christmas. Have a good one.

b


Update: 2013.12.24.17:10 – Added PS

PS Whenever I submit a new file I get an automated mail with the subject line

The automated print check for your file is complete

They tend to accumulate, in a way that is not Sisyphean but rather Augean. Having just got the innards of the book to pass muster, I've now cleared them (that is, the mails) out. There were TWENTY. Now I just have to do the cover. But later in the week. Festivities are in progress. Hokum all ye faithful! (not original, but mine.)


Update: 2013.12.27.11:00 – Added red bits for clarity (and resisted a manus joke [that's a Latin hand –  there, I did it.])

Update: 2013.12.28.14:40 –  Added link to old blog. And another one, just then.

Update: 2014.01.06.12:40 –  Added blue clarifications in last para.

Update: 2014.02.01.13:45 –  Added this aha note:

† EUREKA:

Tale from the word-face

When the proofs arrived, the first thing I noticed about them was an extra-wide line-space (leading [with an /e/] as they say in the trade, although a strip of lead is no longer involved) above and below a line with an IPA symbol in it – which was just a bit ugly when it happened once or twice on a page, but when 5 or 6 lines with IPA symbols in them come together, the extra space adds up with itself and starts to look seriously deformed. (I attempted to explain this in a phone call to @life_academic, who has enough on his plate without worrying about his father's vanity project. [And speaking of vanity, #WVGTbook is now listed with other publications credited on the BNC site.])

But yesterday I put 2 and 2 together: the extra space causes the rogue page-breaks that hampered the submission process. It seems to result from CreateSpace's conversion from WinWord. When I create the PDF file (which I can do with a trial version of Acrobat Pro that I have use of until mid-Feb.) both the line-space and the page-breaks behave sensibly.

I hope when I submit PDF the problem will disappear (although it's possible that there's some conversion process downstream of the PDF,  which I'm ignorant of). But in that case there's nothing I can sensibly do about it anyway, and I'll have to like it or lump it.

Update: 2014.03.06.12:15 –  Added this note:
‡ It's happened again - the conductor talking about us 'dragging him after him' at a linguistically appropriate place. A different conductor this time, at a choral workshop (that link works at the time of writing, but will disappear quite soon – possibly later today, as far as the workshop is concerned) that centred on a medley of songs from Victor Hugo's The Glums [OK, Les Misérables ]. And the language in question was not Latin this time, but the Italic dialect used in the libretto for Verdi's Nabucco (we were singing a few choruses from works that were rather more to my taste). The current Italian for 'drag' is dragare, but here it is traggere. The words are traggi un suono di crudo lamento – 'drags/evokes/brings with it... the sound of <whatever-you-choose-to-translate-crudo-lamento>' ; [and the singing 'translation' doesn't mention dragging or pulling of any kind, so the coincidence is more striking – to me at least].

Update: 2014.03.06.15:15 –  Added translaton of 'The Glums', and updated TES stats in footer.

---

 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 39,500  views  nearly and 5,550 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,000 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

Requiem

Just a quicky - Sundays should be IT-free, but Friday pm and most of Saturday were wiped out by  a system problem.... And as it's a 'requiemmy' sort of day:

Next week I'll be singing a bit of Fauré at a funeral - and at the rehearsal I fully expect the leader of the rehearsal to say to the sops 'What are you singing about? In Paradisum. "In Paradise". You sound as if you're singing about what you had for breakfast....' (Conductors mostly seem, in my experience, to regard breakfast menus as the nadir  of interest.)

But it doesn't mean that. In can mean many things in Latin, but when followed by a noun in the accusative it doesn't mean 'in'. If the words were In Paradiso they would mean 'In Paradise'; but they are In Paradisum ... going on ...deducant Angeli : 'May angels will lead you into Paradise...' One of many other meanings of in, this time followed by the dative, is exemplified in the next phrase: in tuo adventu: that's closer to 'in' in meaning, with a sense something like 'on the occasion of', though I'd favour a simpler translation: 'When you arrive...'.

Interestingly, deducere can also mean 'mislead', but I doubt if Fauré had this in mind - though Barrie Jones, collector of his letters, doubted his piety (on p. 24 of the 1989 edition). His most pious work, the sublime Cantique de Jean Racine (survivor of many a choir's mispronunciation: Verbe égal aux très-haut: 'Verb equal to thirteen waters...' - give me strength! - and de tes dons qu'il retourne comblés : 'of your teeth which he gives back because they're ... impacted?', was written in his teens). And in his later years he may have taken after his friend and teacher Camille Saint-Saens, who - according to one biographer - prescribed for his funeral a short service, if it had to be religious at all, and proscribed the singing of 'Pie Jesus' (sic - Either that final s is the biography's typo, or it was Saint-Saens's attempt to spare Fauré's feelings: 'I don't mean your setting of Pie Jesu.') 

But 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof'. The imagined solecism will probably not be perpetrated.

(And that's another thing: perpetrated/perpetuated. But I must stop. Duty calls.)

Update: 11 Nov pm - updated TESconnect stats, and tweaked second para.

Update:12 Nov am - Added to third para.  and added the fourth

Update: 2018.06.12.14.55 – Correction to deducant translation.