(no subject)

[sanura]

As an undergraduate voice major, I spend a lot of time contemplating words, language, and their capacity for expression. Before I ever studied linguistics, I was still a little skeptical of the nearly mythological explanations and hypotheses the music world would sometimes provide for the idiosyncrasies of language as we sing it. Some of the folk linguistic theories of the music world resembled the retrospective etymologies and explanations for cultural phenomena discussed in the Boas paper; rules of etiquette dictate that one not use a knife to eat because conventions carry inertia, not because it's more dangerous to use a knife than a fork. Similarly, one uses an alveodental vibrant rather than a uvular one in German Lieder not because it's easier, more easily understood, healthier or more beautiful to sing, but because the rules of stage German require it, and the people on the committee that decided the rules of stage German happened to prefer the Italian "r" aesthetically to the Germanic or French one.

A thing that struck me as a pleasant contrast from the music field to the linguistics field was the emphasis linguists place on descriptive rather than prescriptive methods of categorization and teaching. In the Introduction to Linguistics class, careful pedagogical precautions were taken to ensure that the students not learn to perceive one manner of pronunciation as correct; there were only attested or inferable uses of English, rather than "correct" ones. Now, there are reasons music's language is prescriptive; most songs are not in the singer's native language, and if there were no rules for pronunciation to follow, it would be extremely difficult for anyone to sing anything not in his own language. Thus, languages like Hochdeutsch and Sung English and the extremely different-from-speech Sung French are useful to non-native singers. However, the movement in opera (not so much art-song recital, because there one can have literal translation on paper) has been a pendulum regarding the importance of intelligibility (and, to an extent, prescribed diction). In the 1970's, every production at HGO was performed both in English and the original language of the opera. Then the general opinion swayed to the more elitist view that text setting is paramount to the composer's musical intentions, so nothing should ever be sung in a lyric translation because it does neither the music nor the poetry justice. In fact, this argument has been ongoing throughout music history, with the added motivation of nationalism for the native-language side (Joseph II's attempt to establish a national German-language opera tradition, as an example, resulted in a number of Singspiel operas that otherwise would never have been composed). On the other hand, when a language is culturally salient, even if it's not a culture's native language, the literature and music tend to gravitate toward that language. Italian opera was the only opera for a long time after its invention, because of the Venetian and Florentine prestige, and everyone sang in Italian, whether the performance was in Seville, Vienna, London or Lyons. This pendulum of opinion regarding the correctness of performing in the native language of the audience versus the older tradition of performing in the native language of the composer is reminiscent to me of the historically contrasting opinions on one of the basic tenets of modern linguistics: concentrating on the contemporary spoken language and engaging the speakers' cognitive functions as part of linguistics, versus studying written lists of older, supposedly "purer" and "less corrupt" words from less immediate languages and constructing paradigms from them (as we discussed regarding the Osthoff & Brugmann neogrammarian introduction).

There has in the last couple decades, during the development of the relatively young field of period musical performance practice, been a move back toward the "authentic," the descriptive pronunciation of each composer's native language. I find this marginally analogous to the movement from traditional grammar and comparative philology to modern linguistics. This more diverse and less circumscribed approach is much more interesting to me than the prescribed method of pronunciation. Neapolitan art songs, sung in the Neapolitan dialect, reveal facets of the music that would not be heard if the prescriptive rules of standard Italian diction were applied. Karl Orff's popular masterpiece Carmina Burana has a completely different affect when its three languages, Germanic Latin, Old High German, and archaic French, are pronounced "authentically" rather than as standardized church Latin, stage German pronunciation, and modern French, respectively. Last semester I sang a cycle of Sephardic songs harmonized by Joaquin Rodrigo, and in my opinion the Ladino carries the phrasing, the tone and the expression with much more ease than stage Spain-Spanish. In any case, this is all to say that I personally prefer the more descriptive manner of pronunciation to the prescriptive, and the latter seems to be getting old-fashioned in the current trend.

Comments

[music-dissident.livejournal.com]

Yay. I almost know exactly what you are talking about mostly, and I completely agree really really.