Episodes
Thursday Apr 26, 2012
English Diction: Treatment of R
Thursday Apr 26, 2012
Thursday Apr 26, 2012
Canadian baritone and diction specialist Jason Nedecky put together this worksheet on the treatment of R in English Diction. Please feel free to download and use in your studies!
Tuesday Apr 17, 2012
Episode 57
Tuesday Apr 17, 2012
Tuesday Apr 17, 2012
The Diction Police is now officially in its third year! Thank you so much to all listeners around the world--the audience has more than doubled in its second year, and I'd love to say that again next year, so I'm asking everyone to please spread the word: share on Facebook, post and write comments on the Facebook page, tweet on Twitter, send the link to your singer/coach friends and post comments on iTunes so that more people can find The Diction Police and benefit from it! Thank you! This week and next our topic will be English Diction, concentrating on the differences between American Standard English (AS) and British Received Pronunciation (RP). Canadian baritone and diction specialist Jason Nedecky is with us to discuss the Thomas Hardy poem "Before Life and After", focusing on the initial WH whine/wine rule [w] vs. [ʍ], the prefixes RE-, PRE- and BE- and the vowel shifts that occur between AS and RP English, including when [æ] becomes [ɑ], when [ɑ] or [ʌ] become the upside down dark A [ɒ] and when the American dark A [ɑ] becomes open O [ɔ] in RP. "Before Life and After" is the final song in Benjamin Britten's song cycle Winter Words, a set of 8 Thomas Hardy poems. Hardy was a Victorian Realist author, probably most famous for his novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but he also wrote 947 poems--all of his works are available online at the Thomas Hardy Society. Jason was kind enough to allow me to post a worksheet that he uses in his course, entitled "English Diction: Pronunciation Shifts in Singing", which is posted in this blog entry. The dictionary that we mention is Longman Pronunciation Dictionary--from what I could tell online, it seems that the 2nd edition has phonetics but the 3rd edition has transcriptions. I've ordered the second edition, but if anyone has access to the 3rd edition, please report back as to its usefulness! And of course, we mention Madeleine Marshall's The Singer's Manual of English Diction. Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, on the Facebook page, on Twitter @dictionpolice or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com UPDATE: Jason has assured me that the 3rd edition of the Longman has phonetics!
Tuesday Apr 17, 2012
English Diction: Pronunciation Shifts in Singing
Tuesday Apr 17, 2012
Tuesday Apr 17, 2012
Canadian baritone and diction specialist Jason Nedecky put together this worksheet on the vowel shifts between American Standard English (AS) and British Received Pronunciation (RP). The last page includes the consonant-related shifts--medial T and D, initial WH words and the J-glide words. He uses the Canadian flag vs the British flag to differentiate between AS and RP. Please feel free to download and use in your studies! Thank you, Jason!
Monday Sep 05, 2011
Episode 40
Monday Sep 05, 2011
Monday Sep 05, 2011
English Diction is our topic this week, covering the texts to "The Roadside Fire" and the aria "Iris, hence away" from Händel's Semele with vocal coach Mark Lawson, contralto Rebecca Raffell and tenor Donald George. Our focus is on what to do with Rs, WH words, the crazy spelling in English and some differences between American Standard and British Received pronunciation. Some of the new phonetic symbols referred to on this episode are [ɝ] and [ɚ] (for those Rs in diphthongs and triphthongs) and [ɒ] (for the British open back rounded vowel). The Roadside Fire is the 11th poem in Robert Louis Stevenson's Songs of Travel and Other Verses (although most of us know it as the 3rd song in Ralph Vaughan Williams' song cycle Songs of Travel). Most of Stevenson's novels, poems and essays are in the public domain and available as free downloads at Project Gutenberg. Here is a libretto for Händel's Semele, for Juno's Aria, scroll down to Accompagnato Nr. 31 "Awake Saturnia from thy lethargy" and Air Nr. 34 "Iris, hence away", skipping over Iris' Recitative in the middle. iTunes University is a free way to "visit" university classes--they have topics ranging from all the classical to modern languages, history, Fine Arts, mathematics, humanities... pretty much anything that universities offer, there's a class on iTunes U for it. Just go to your iTunes Store and look across the top for the heading iTunes U. I also mention the term "Lingua franca" at the beginning of the podcast, and I learned that phrase from iTunes U! Just as a reminder, I refer quite a bit to the two main books on English Diction, Madeleine Marshall's The Singer's Manual of English Diction which has been the standard for many years, and Kathryn LaBouff's Singing and Communicating in English, which covers the differences between American Standard, British Received and the Mid-Atlantic Dialect in great detail. Feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com
Friday Sep 10, 2010
Episode 17
Friday Sep 10, 2010
Friday Sep 10, 2010
Since we talked so much last week about studying the diction of your native language, I thought it only fitting that we discuss a little English Diction today! Our guests are Mark Lawson, an American coach on the music staff of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, and Aaron Pegram, an American tenor in the ensemble at the Semperoper in Dresden. Our texts today are "Take O Take Those Lips Away" and Stephen Foster's "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair". We concentrate on the American diphthongs and how to handle the Rs when singing in English. You can find the texts through the Lied and Art Song Text Page link at the right. On this episode, we talked about the standard textbook, Madeleine Marshall's The Singer's Manual of English Diction, which has been around for several decades. I also mentioned Kathryn LaBouff's book, Singing and Communicating in English, which includes separate sections for Mid-Atlantic, American and British pronunciation. A big thank you to everyone who has shared The Diction Police on their Facebook pages, word-of-mouth is the greatest commercial! And also many thanks to the people who have rated this podcast on iTunes, I really appreciate it! As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me here, on the Facebook page, or to write me directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com