Making the case for Lyric Diction/IPA
Hello and welcome to The Diction Police’s new blog! François and I will each be posting once a month on any topic that strikes our fancy—this won’t be diction lessons, but rather personal and professional anecdotes, observations, and musings. For our first posting, I thought it would be best to talk a little about why we find lyric diction so important.
Over
the decades as someone who specializes in the study of lyric diction, one of
the attitudes that I’ve run across from time to time is that studying diction
is pointless, a waste of time, charlatanism to take money from students—all
anyone really needs to do is to learn to speak the language, and that will be
enough to make their pronunciation in singing clear.
Let’s
take a closer look at some of the arguments I’ve heard over the years:
Speaking the language
is enough
If
this were true, then every native speaker of a language would be completely
comprehensible when they sing. You’ve never heard an American singing “O Holy
Night” and thought, “Wow, I have no idea what they are saying”? Being fluent in a language does not mean that you make no
diction mistakes or that people will understand you when singing. There are
many people living in Germany for over 20 years who sound more American than I
when speaking the language. Being a native speaker is also no help, because
oftentimes in both English and German we will swallow consonants that on an
opera stage need to be spit loudly in order to be intelligible, and we don’t
notice it because we aren’t aware of the problem—we understand what we are singing. There are rules for lyric
diction in French that supersede colloquial pronunciation, but not all French
coaches and singers know them unless they have actually studied diction. I’ve
fought (and won) fights with French speakers over forbidden liaisons. One of my
friends (not American) was a French minor in college and speaks quite well, but
she still didn’t know that the second syllable of “solennel” is not a schwa and
I had to correct her and the people she was coaching. Speaking the language is
a great start, but it isn’t the end of the journey and it can’t teach us
everything about pronunciation.
The
rules of diction were made up by vocal coaches
RAI (the Italian television) has a website dedicated to
pronunciation for television and radio that also applies to Italian lyric
diction, and everyone knows of the Zingarelli dictionary, because it contains
the Italian standard of pronunciation. Fouché’s Traité de prononciation française harkens back to the 1950s, and the Sieb’s Bühnenaussprache (stage diction) came
out in 1898. The German German diction book, Der kleine Hey, is excerpted from
a much longer book written by a voice teacher at the turn of the last century,
too. These are not random rules that Nico Castel recently made up to create a
new field of study for singers to waste their time and money with—if it were,
all of these resources would only have been made for Americans, because we are
the only ones who have diction classes. These are worldwide industry standards
for anyone using their voice to make their living in these languages, be
they opera singers, actors, commentators, or newspeople.
Any
native-speaker can tell you whether or not they understand you
While
that may be technically true, not every native-speaker knows whether you are
pronouncing the words correctly. In fact, native-speakers tend to have a much
lower standard when it comes to foreigners singing in their language, because
they automatically allow for a few mistakes as long as the general gist is
there. On the other side of that coin, not everyone can truly understand
language when it’s sung—my brother speaks fluent English, but he would have a
difficult time understanding the best rendition of “Must the winter come so soon”
because he’s not used to listening to words stretched out so long.
Coaches listen only for syllables and not expression of
the language
I’m
in the middle of Carmen rehearsals right now, and in the 2nd act
finale, the smugglers try to convince Don José to come with them, and one
phrase is “tu t’y feras quand tu verras la-bas”. As a coach, this is a phrase
to keep an ear out for—the tendency is to open “feras” because singers want it
to rhyme with “verras”. Some of the best singers in the world can get this
flipped around because it goes by quickly, and some coaches wouldn’t even hear
it happening. So yes, sometimes we listen for syllables—because we have to,
because sometimes they are standard mistakes that are made often. But we are also
always listening for line and expression and music. Don’t confuse the fact that
we are correcting a syllable here and there for the fact that we aren’t
listening for anything else.
Diction coaches aren’t
qualified to tell someone how to sing something because they don’t have any
vocal pedagogy
All
of the diction coaches I know have been singers, voice teachers, actors, or
vocal coaches. Each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses, depending
on their training, whether they accompanied voice lessons during their studies,
or with whom they studied. Each of them has something to offer, and it’s up to
the singer to apply what works and what doesn’t according to their own
technique. This gets easier as a singer gets older and more established with
their own technique.
Diction/IPA is a
crutch so that you don’t have to learn the language
Absolutely
not!! Learning your languages is an essential part of becoming an opera singer,
and diction does not replace the study of language. What it does is give us a
common ground to work from in a coaching. If you are accidentally singing
“füllen” with [y], then you are actually singing “fühlen”. If you know the
difference between [y] and [ʏ], you can simply write in the appropriate vowel.
Both of these are common words in German, which means that neither will sound
incorrect to our foreign ears, so having a shorthand to notate this is crucial.
My
first production in Germany was Dialogues des Carmélites in French. With all
German singers. None of whom could speak French, none of whom knew IPA and at
the time I could barely muddle my way through German. It led to hours upon
hours of trying to find a way to explain the sounds, and them trying to find a
way to notate their music that would help them practice when I wasn’t there and
it was frustrating for everyone. Over the years, I’ve seen people develop their
own shorthand, which is totally fine—you don’t HAVE to use the IPA symbol, as
long as you have a symbol that makes sense to you without question later, but
we do need a jumping-off point to get started. IPA makes it easier to connect
initially.
Pronouncing everything
ruins the legato
Good
diction helps place the voice properly. If the vowels are not in the sweet spot,
comprehension is greatly reduced. If an American sings the ‘l’ back in the
throat, it can cause tension—if they follow diction rules and sing an
Italianate ‘l’, it will help alleviate some of that tension and keep the voice
forward. Sometimes people try to over-pronounce, and that is just as difficult
to understand. There is a balance between doing enough to make yourself
comprehensible, and trying so hard to clearly articulate every syllable that
the legato line is disturbed.
All
of this being said—diction is not a
suicide pact! According to the laws of physics (Carnegie Mellon actually
had a class on Physics of Sound, it was fascinating), certain vowels resonate
better at certain frequencies, so vowel modification is actually a thing and
can be a great tool—if you know what vowel to modify to. When it comes to
consonants, it you are on a note above the staff and singing an ‘m’ will cause
your jaw to lock and the voice to squeak, don’t sing the ‘m’! But there are
ways to trick the audience into thinking they’ve heard an ‘m’ in that
situation, too, and a good coach can offer suggestions and options to make that
shift.
*****
In closing, the important thing to remember is that diction is a
tool. Diction is NOT the end result. Simply marking in open and closed vowels
is not the study of diction and when you've done that it doesn't mean you're
“done”. Diction gives you the means by which you can make yourself
understandable and by which a coach can help you to improve. Gone are the days when
singers can specialize their entire lives in a certain language or repertoire.
Today’s young singers must be well-versed in enough languages and styles to
make themselves marketable in order to get to the next level, where they can
then be a little more specific. Adding this tool
into your language/practice arsenal can help make everything else run more
smoothly.
--Ellen
