The Diction Police

Episode 71

In the second episode of our two-part discussion of Modern Greek Diction, Lydía Zervános works through the texts Κάτω στον Άγιο Σίδερο and Ο Ναός. We focus on the letters Gamma γ and Kappa κ and the vowel digraphs: αι [ε]; ει, οι and υι which all become [i]; αυ [av] or [af] and ευ [εv] or [εf]; and ου [u], along with the accent marking ´ and the diaeresis ¨ .

Κάτω στον Άγιο Σίδερο is probably recognized better as "La-bas, vers l'église", from Ravel's Five Greek Songs. Ο Ναός was composed by Μανώλης Καλομοίρης (the founder of the Greek National School of Music) to a text by Κωστής Παλαμάς (a Greek poet in the late 1880s who wrote the words to the Olympic Hymn).

The other resources that I mentioned in the episode were:

• Learning Greek Podcasts by the Hellenic American Union--a podcast where you can practice listening and learn quite a few useful colloquial phrases in Modern Greek
• Επικοινωνήστε ελληνικά--all in Modern Greek, this is a great book to learn the language from, since you don't have to keep flipping between the Greek alphabet and the Latin one as you're learning; there are 3 main books and 2 workbooks to go along with each of them
• Minos--try this on Spotify! Type in Minos in the Spotify search and under the albums you should get a few listings for Greek Pop music. It's a great way to hear the sounds of the language!

As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger

Episode 70

Είμαι πάρα πολύ χαρουμένη για αυτά τα επισόδια! This episode and the next will be on one of my favorite topics--Modern Greek Diction! On this episode, baritone Aris Argiris works through the Greek alphabet with us, through the text Κόρες της Αττικής. Κόρες της Αττικής was set to music by Theodoros Karyotakis (I could only find this in German on Wikipedia), a student of Dmitri Mitropoulos. The text to this song can be found on page 49 of Lydia Zervanos' Greek Diction Guide for Singers, from a Presidential Scholars Project she put together several years ago. She has since tweaked some of the transcriptions for errors, but the rules to Greek diction in the first half of the project are invaluable. As I promised, here is the Greek alphabet, along with an Americanized form of their names plus the options for their pronunciation (not including the digraphs that we'll talk about on the next episode):

• Α α - alpha [a]
• Β β - vita [v]
• Γ γ - gamma [γ] [ʝ]
• Δ δ - delta [ð]
• Ε ε - epsilon [ε]
• Ζ ζ - zita [z]
• Η η - ita [i]
• Θ θ - thita [θ]
• Ι ι - iota [i] [j] [ç]
• Κ κ - kappa [k] [c]
• Λ λ - lambda [l] [λ]
• Μ μ - mi [m]
• Ν ν - ni [n]
• Ξ ξ - ksi [ks]
• Ο ο - omikron [ɔ]
• Π π - pi [p]
• Ρ ρ - rho [r]
• Σ σ ς - sigma [s] [z]
• Τ τ - tau [t]
• Υ υ - ipsilon [i] [v] [f]
• Φ φ - fi [f]
• Χ χ - xi [x] [ç]
• Ψ ψ - psi [ps]
• Ω ω - omega [ɔ]

Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, on the Facebook page (and now you can even "like" each separate episode here on the blog!), on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 69

In the second half of my conversation with Italian bass Maurizio Muraro, we discuss the text to Don Bartolo's aria "A un dottor della mia sorte" from Il barbiere di Siviglia. This time we concentrate on the rule of "raddoppiamento sintattico" (called phrasal doubling in English), the combination GLI [ʎ], S before a voiced consonant (which becomes a voiced [z]) and when to roll or not roll Rs! You can find a libretto for Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Opernführer. Scroll down to Aria No.8 (remember to make sure it's on L for libretto and I for Italian!). The fabulous website resources that I mentioned in this episode are: Technology for the Classical Singer, a must-have resource for all of us, with blog postings on everything from foreign language dictionaries to the free treatises on singing at IMSLP to where to find accompaniment tracks. She also has amazing video tutorials to teach us all how to get the most out of our technology! SingersBabel, a diction website with video clips that allow you to see the text and IPA transcription while you listen! Focusing on French, German and English repertoire right now, it has a large selection of pieces to choose from, including Bach Cantatas and choral repertoire! And don't forget to have a good chuckle over Bugs Bunny's classic Rabbit of Seville :-) As always, please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 68

After an unexpected extended delay due to a climbing accident and travelling over Easter, we're back! Italian bass Maurizio Muraro, discusses Banco's aria from Macbeth in this episode, focusing on the palatal consonants GN [ɲ] and GL [λ], the combinations NG [ŋg] and NC [ŋk], double consonants and phrasal doubling, plus the suffixes -MENTO and -MENTE with stressed closed E [e]. Here is a libretto for Verdi's Macbeth--for Banco's aria scroll down to Nr. 8 1/2 Scena Banco. Sometimes the Opera Guide link will revert to the German text, or even to the Synopsis page, so make sure to click on Libretto and then I for Italian. The resources I talked about on this episode were the Dizionario d'ortografia e di pronunzia from RAI (the Italian television station) and the Wikipedia entry for standard suffix endings in Italian, including lists of words ending in -MENTO and -MENTE. The iPad apps that I now use for translation and diction purposes are the Harpers Collins Italian-English Dictionary and lo Zingarelli Italian Dictionary (which also gives open and closed Es and Os for all verb forms!). Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 67

We're sticking with Händel's Messiah this week, with soprano Amanda Majeski discussing "Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter of Zion" and the four short soprano recitatives before the chorus "Glory to God", followed by the rest of my conversation with Jan and Catherine McDaniel of the Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University. This week's episode focuses on English diphthongs and triphthongs, implosion and explosion of final Ds and Ts before another T and the specific words "righteous" and "with" (which can be the voiced delta [δ] or the unvoiced theta [θ]). The libretto for the Messiah can be found here (the recitatives are Nos. 14a, 14b, 15 and 16, "Rejoice Greatly" is No. 18) and the score is available as a free download from the Petrucci Music Library. We talk quite a bit about Madeleine Marshall's book The Singer's Manual of English Diction, which is still one of the most important reference materials for English Diction. If you want a brush-up on the vowel shifts between American Standard and British Received Pronunciation, check out Jason Nedecky's worksheet and for more discussion of the  diphthongs in English, check out Episode 17. I left one completely mispronounced word in there, just for fun, and Miss Kitty Fantastico makes a quick cameo at the beginning that I couldn't help leaving in :-) If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact me here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com NB: I found some new information that I needed to add into this episode, so I redid the episode, in case people are wondering why it's suddenly slightly longer. The word SHONE in British RP should be [ʃɒn] rather than the diphthong [ʃoʊn] that it would be in American Standard. The word SHOWN remains a diphthong in both British RP and American Standard.

Episode 66

As a belated Valentine's present, The Diction Police is back with all new episodes for 2013! Miss Kitty Fantastico and I are all settled in our new apartment and I have quite a few episodes already recorded, so we should be able to stay on track for this spring! This week and next we'll be talking about some arias from Händel's Messiah. On this episode, tenor Charles Reid goes through the text of "Comfort Ye... Ev'ry Valley", and then we discuss some of the problematic traditional misuse of diction with Jan and Catherine McDaniel, from the faculty of the Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University, focusing on the words COMFORT and SAITH (plus other words that tend to be mispronounced), rolling Rs in the combination CR and GR, the pronunciation of the letter X and a whole lot about schwas. The score for Händel's Messiah can be found as a free download at Petrucci Music Library (IMSLP) and you can find the libretto here ("Comfort Ye... Ev'ry Valley" begins the Messiah). We talk about the word COMFORT quite a bit on this episode and I promised to post YouTubes--I found one with Jerry Hadley singing, this one where tenor Howard Crook sings COMFORT correctly at least once :-) and a very interesting BBC TV show about Comfort Ye with Trevor Pinnock discussing it, Kurt Streit singing. There are, of course, a ton of YouTubes of this recit and aria, have fun listening to them and comparing the diction to what we talk about in the episode! Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 65-Special Edition for Young Coaches

Today's episode is in response to a request from the Facebook page, specifically for young coaches! Conductor Erik Nielsen, and singers Simon Neal, John Packard and Nadja Mchantaf talk about what they are looking for from a rehearsal pianist or a vocal coach and I share my experiences as a coach, including a few of my tricks and advice on practicing for auditions. The audition repertoire for coaches that I mentioned:

• Mozart--Le nozze di Figaro 2nd Act Finale; Così fan tutte 1st Act Finale
• French--Carmen Smugglers Quintet
• Strauss--Elektra opening through the Magd Scene; Der Rosenkavalier opening (including Wie du warst); Salome Jews Quintet
• Chorus Scenes--La Bohème 2nd Act; Otello opening; Falstaff Fugue

If anyone has other repertoire that they have found useful, please feel free to post them in the comments section! One thing I didn't mention in the episode is Wolf Trap Opera's Aria Frequency List--they list the arias that were performed with the number of times they heard them. So if you're looking to prepare yourself to accompany audition season in New York City, start learning those arias :-) I'm moving in a few days and not sure when my new DSL will be hooked up, but I'll be working on new episodes in the meantime so that once it's installed we can get back on track! Please feel free to contact me with requests, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 64-17th Century French Diction

Olivier Bettens takes us through the pronunciation of French in the 17th Century with a scene from Armide. We talk about some exceptional words that are the same in modern pronunciation, alexandrines, the imperfect verb tense and a fifth nasal vowel. We got through as many rules as we could in the past 2 episodes, but there is a lot of information on this subject, so to find out more, check out Olivier's website, Chantez-vous francais? Armide was written by dramatist/librettist Philippe Quinault and composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Lully is considered the founder of French opera, even though he was born in Florence, Italy, and only moved to France when he was 14! Quinault was a playwrite, but in 1671 he contributed to a libretto that Lully set and from that point on only wrote libretti for Lully's works. The text for this episode is in a separate post. I'm leaving for the States tomorrow for a week, but I'll be back next Sunday and will post another episode shortly thereafter! In the meantime, please feel free to contact me here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com NB: In this episode, I pronounced Lully's name incorrectly--the "p" in Jean-Baptiste should have been silent! I'll correct it for future downloads, but for people who downloaded it previously, make sure to take note and not follow my mistake. Many thanks to Jason Nedecky for noticing!

Episode 63-16th Century French Diction

This week we focus on 16th Century French with specialist Olivier Bettens. Our text is "Mignonne allons voir si la rose" by Pierre de Ronsard, and we discuss the differences between 16th Century and Modern French pronunciation and spelling.  I had some problems with a previous posting of this, so I'm hoping that this new post will work--fingers crossed! Pierre de Ronsard was a very famous and prolific poet in 16th Century France, one of a group of 7 poets, called the Pleiades, dedicated to bringing French literature of the time up to classical standards. During the podcast I said that the Pleiades brings us back to mythology, because the Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. All the websites I found with the text had modernized versions of it, so I'm uploading a pdf of the original plate that Olivier and I were looking at (I can't seem to attach two files to one post, so it will be in a separate post). The Long S, which looks like a lower-case "f" without a crossbar, was maintained in many languaged for centuries; it is even at the top of the American Declaration of Independence as well as in most German books up until the past century. There are many websites with lyrics and music of this song with different spellings: The Lied, Art Song and Choral Text Archive; Costeley's setting of this for chorus; Richard Wagner's setting for solo voice and piano; and a French Wikipedia article with the text. Olivier Bettens' website "Chantez-vous francais?" is a phenomenal reference source for Medieval and Baroque French Diction. It's mostly in French, bet several sections are also translated into English. He also recommended the website Prononciation, with a bibliography of reference materials from the 1500s through to today, all on the topic of French Diction throughout the ages. This episode came about because of a question from a listener, so please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com  I do my best to honor them as quickly as I can!

Episode 62

Simon Neal is back with us this week discussing the text "The Vagabond". We go through the text, focusing on the problem with Ls and Rs in English, dealing with pianissimi and why we should sing pure Italianate vowels in every language. I'll also talk about a phonetic concept for unstressed I (between the closed [i] and open [I] sounds) that Jan & Catherine McDaniel (English diction teachers at the Bass School of Music, Oklahoma City University) sent me, the SCHWI. "The Vagabond" is the first poem in Robert Louis Stevenson's Songs of Travel, and the first song in Ralph Vaughan Williams' song cycle of the same name. I found some interesting youtube clips of this song, Thomas Allen with Simon Rattle and the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and a very early recording of Peter Dawson in 1923 (pianist isn't listed), with lots of rrrrrolled Rs. The Bryn Terfel CD is also quite good but I couldn't find a youtube with that version. The previous entries that I talk about are Episodes 48 and 49 for tongue exercises, and Jason Nedecky's Treatment of R and Pronunciation Shifts for the HAND and ASK words. Please feel free to contact me here, at the Facebook Page, on Twitter @dictionpolice or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com