The Diction Police

Episode 51

We're sticking with German Diction again, with a crew of low-voiced men--basses Thorsten Grümbel and Georg Zeppenfeld, as well as baritone Christoph Pohl, return to discuss the texts to "Anakreons Grab" and "Wie Melodien zieht es mir". We concentrate on the long sentence structures in these poems, along with short unstressed closed Es and the vowel combination IE (which is usually [i:] but in these cases becomes [i:ə] or the transcription possibilities of [jə] or [iə]) at the end of a word. Goethe's "Anakreons Grab" refers to the ancient Greek poet, Anacreon--I also found a nice blog post entitled "What I like about this song". Klaus Groth's poem "Wie Melodien zieht es mir" is most famously set by Brahms (in fact, it's the opening music for the podcast!), but Charles Ives also set this poem, as well as 17 other German poems, several of which have been recorded by Thomas Hampson. Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter @dictionpolice or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 50

Happy 2012! We're back from the holidays with German Diction. German actress Susanne Plassman discusses "Kennst du das Land" from Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and bass Georg Zeppenfeld talks about König Heinrich's Aria from Lohengrin, "Mein Herr und Gott" (scroll down a little beyond halfway to find the aria). The basis for this episode came from bass Thorsten Grümbel, and at his suggestion, we focus on [ʃ], [ç] and [x], as well as when ZU- at the beginning of a word isn't stressed. If you haven't already heard Georg Zeppenfeld sing this role (because I posted it on the Facebook page several weeks ago), here is the YouTube link to the Bayreuth performance last summer--Mein Herr und Gott starts at 5:26. The entire production was broadcast on TV here in Europe, and it's posted on YouTube in it's entirety. There's also a little opera karaoke link, in case you would like to sing this aria yourself! I found some YouTube clips with 2 singers who connect Kennst du (Birgit Nilsson with John Wustman, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf with Gerald Moore), as well as some who separate Kennst/du (Christa Ludwig with Erik Werba, Juliane Banse with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin). The blog Study Hacks has a few postings on Multitasking. There is also an article called The Myth of Multitasking at The New Atlantis. The Diction Police is now on Twitter! Look for me at @dictionpolice. As always, please feel free to leave comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, now on Twitter :-) or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 49-Special Edition-Tongue Exercises

In the second of our two-part series on tongue exercises, Silke Kurpiers gives us a few more advanced exercises to try (some of which require pretzel sticks or straws) and goes more in-depth on practicing rolled Rs. Be sure to listen to Episode 48 first and get a handle on those exercises before trying these! Then for a treat, Silke shows us a few German tongue twisters to get things really moving:

1. Zehn zahme Ziegen zogen zehn Zentner Zucker zum Zoo.
2. Zwischen zwei Zwetschgenzweigen saßen zwei zwitschernde Schwalben.
3. Fischers Fritz fischt frische Fische. Frische Fische fischt Fischers Fritz.
4. Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut und Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid.

You can find these (with some slight variations in text) and more German tongue twisters at the Wikipedia page entitled Zungenbrecher. Along the left side of that page, you can also find fun tongue twisters in many other languages, and they seem to have even more at the actual entry for Tongue Twisters, so once you've mastered these you can move on to Italian, Spanish, etc! Look for the pdf drawings of the tongue exercises in a separate blog entry entitled Special Edition Download. And keep your eyes on the Facebook page--Silke and I are planning to create a YouTube video so you can actually see these tongue exercises in action rather than just listening! I'll let you know when we get that posted. Since we are headed into crunch time at the opera house and most people are in finals weeks, on university break or dealing with a heavy schedule of holiday concerts, The Diction Police will be back mid-January with all-new episodes. Please feel free to contact me here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com with questions, comments or suggestions. Have a wonderful and blessed holiday season! See you in 2012 :-)

 

NB-The long-awaited Tongue Exercises Video can now be found at The Diction Police: Special Diction Unit! Come check it out!

Episode 48-Special Edition-Tongue Exercises

This is the first in a 2-part special edition of The Diction Police--all about tongue exercises! In this episode, Silke Kurpiers, a stage manager at the Semperoper, but also a trained professional speech therapist, gives us some basic tongue exercises to gain more independence of the tongue and train it in all directions. She also gives us some ideas to prepare for rolling Rs. The way this blog is set up, I can only attach one file to every blog posting, so for a pdf file of the exercises (which Silke drew by hand!) look for the blog entry entitle Special Edition Download. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for me, please feel free to contact me here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

 

 

NB-The long-awaited Tongue Exercises Video can now be found at The Diction Police: Special Diction Unit! Come check it out!

Episode 47

This week finishes off a series of episodes on many of the arias from Le nozze di Figaro. Coach Matteo Pais walks us through "E Susanna non vien... Dove sono" and "Bravo signor padrone... Se vuol ballare", focusing on open and closed E and O in every position. Opernführer has the libretto for Le nozze di Figaro (remember to click on libretto and then I for Italian!). For "Dove sono", scroll down to Recit and Aria No. 20 in the third act, and "Se vuol ballare" starts with the recit just before Cavatina No. 3 close to the beginning. Here is the Wikipedia article on Italian language, in case you want to read a little about the acute accent (´) and the circumflex accent (^) in Italian, just click on Writing System in the Contents box and it will take you there immediately. The other resources I mentioned in this episode are the Jillians Michaels podcast, The Collaborative Piano Blog (a must-read for coaches and very useful for everyone!), the book Talent is Overrated and a website devoted to learning better study habits called Study Hacks. Much of the research on the habits of elite performers refer to a study done with the students at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Happy Thanksgiving! Ellen

Episode 46

We're back on German diction with bass Thorsten Grümbel and sopranos Netta Or and Karen Bandelow, focusing on glottals in German and some unstressed prefixes with open E (er-, her-, ver- and zer-), as well as reviewing a few things that we've talked about before, like the NG sound [ŋ], the unpronounced intervocalic H and some diphthongs. Our texts for this episode are "O Isis und Osiris" from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (I did not link this to the Opera Guide website because there are several typos there), and "In dem Schatten meiner Locken" from Wolf's Spanisches Liederbuch. I dug through many YouTube clips in researching this episode, so I wanted to include them here. For "O Isis und Osiris" I found Rene Pape (who lives in Dresden and drops in on performances sometimes!), Kurt Moll, Gottlieb Frick and Hans-Peter König (an old colleague of mine from Düsseldorf who sings all over the world, especially the Wagner repertoire). For "In dem Schatten meiner Locken" Elisabeth Grümmer with Hertha Klust uses all of the glottals we talked about, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf has two posted clips, one with Gerald Moore and one with Wilhelm Furtwängler where she uses considerably more glottals than the other performance, and I also found a clip of Lotte Lehmann (with unknown pianist) who doesn't seem to use glottals at all. I also specifically looked for Fischer-Dieskau using glottals and found several examples--the most obvious were in Erlkönig when he says "den Erlkönig" and in "Die Forelle" when he says "Doch endlich". Enjoy this little study on glottals! I'll be in the States giving some master classes for the next few weeks, so the podcast will be back up mid-November for a few episodes before the holidays, but in the meantime, please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 45

In the second half of my interview with Simone di Felice, we concentrate on the Count's Aria "Hai già vinta la causa" from Le nozze di Figaro. We cover those assimilations of N again, as well as diphthongs and triphthongs, a few more verb forms and non-aspirated K, P and T. The Opera Guide has a libretto for Le Nozze di Figaro. You'll have to click on Libretto and the letter I (for Italian!), then scroll down to Aria No. 18, in Act 3. The book that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode is Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin. My personal favorite Italian Diction books, which I discussed last week and this, are Evalina Colorni's Singer's Italian: A Manual of Diction and Phonetics and David Adams' A Handbook of Diction for Singers (which also covers French and German--and he was my diction teacher at Cincinnati!). Plus, the useful practice tip I menioned at the end of the episode is thanks to my first diction teacher, Larry Marietta! I'll try to get next week's episode out on time, but we're in technical rehearsals for Alcina right now, so I can make no promises. I'll keep updating the Facebook page with my progress. In the meantime, feel free to contact me with any comments, questions or suggestions here, on the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 44

Italian Vocal Coach Simone di Felice is with us to discuss more arias from Le nozze di Figaro--since he and I had such a long conversation with a ton of useful information, it will be spread out over two episodes! This week it's Bartolo's aria, "La Vendetta", focusing on some standard verb endings with stressed E, some consonants that are automatically doubled between two vowels and the assimilation of N before certain consonants. The new phonetic letter we talk about is the labio dental [ɱ]. The Opera Guide has a libretto for Le Nozze di Figaro. You'll have to click on Libretto and the letter I (for Italian!), then scroll down to Aria No. 4. The history resources I mentioned on this episode are the classes "History 5: European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present" from UC Berkeley on iTunes University (there are several years to choose from) and the podcast The History of Rome, hosted by Mike Duncan (also available free on iTunes). Feel free to contact me with any comments, questions or suggestions here, on the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 43

This is the second part of our 2-part series on Swedish diction, with mezzo-soprano Sofi Lorentzen discussing the text to Sibelius's Fågellek. This week we're talking about consonant combinations and clusters, including: DJ, GJ and HJ (all the j-glide); LG [lj]; GN [ŋn]; NG [ŋ] and NK [ŋk]; KJ and TJ as well as the soft K [ɕ]; SJ, SKJ, STJ and SK before soft vowels [ɧ]; and the R combinations RD [ɖ], RG [rj], RL [l], RN [ɳ], RS [ʂ] and RT [ʈ]. Our text for today, Fågellek, is by Finnish author Karl August  Tavaststjerna, considered the first modern Swedish writer in Finnland. If this link works, I found a Swedish site that Google translated here. There are no free online recordings, but some that are available for purchase are Essential Highlights of Karita Mattila and Kim Borg Sings Sibelius Songs (which also has both songs from Episode 42 as well!). The preview clip I found is available at Passionato Classical Music Archives as well. I also found a cute YouTube called Simple Swedish which is good for a laugh, and a website to learn called Learning Swedish Online that offers the first 7 lessons as a free download. Feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions at ellen@ellenrissinger.com

Episode 42

This week we're branching off into a new language--Swedish! In the first of a 2-part series, mezzo-soprano Sofi Lorentzen discusses the vowels and consonants of Swedish, with two songs from Sibelius' Opus 36, No. 4 "Säf, säf, susa" and No.1 "Svarta rosor". The new phonetic letters that we introduce this week are for the letter U [ʉː] & [ɵ] and for the soft K sound [ɕ]. "Säf, säf, susa" is a poem by Gustav Fröding, "Svarta rosor" by Ernst Josephson, a Swedish portrait painter. Composer Jean Sibeluis was Finnish, but most of his songs are to Swedish texts, not surprising since both Finnish and Swedish are equally the official languages of Finnland. Wikipedia has a page on Swedish pronunciation, which I used to help prepare for the interview. The alphabet and writing systems website that I mentioned on this episode is Omniglot, a great resource for all languages which includes tips on learning languages, useful phrases and tongue twisters! They also have a pronunciation page for each language (including Swedish) which includes a phonetic guide. Some of the YouTube clips I found for these songs include: "Säf, säf, susa" with Jussi Björling (and uncredited orchestra?), Birgit Nilsson with the Vienna Opera Orchestra and Håkan Hagegård with Warren Jones on the piano. "Svarta rosor" with Jüssi Björling (again an uncredited pianist!) and a recording from 1902 of Björling's teacher John Forsell with pianist Armas Järnefelt (a contemporary of Sibelius, who studied at the music institute in Helsinki with him). There are many more, these are just a few to get you started! As always, feel free to contact me with questions or comments here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com