On Thursday, December 18, 2003, at 01:41 AM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
Hmmm... I'm not sure what you mean by "an ordinary way" -- for me, at least, the ordinary way of pronouncing "opening" *is* "ope-ning." It's one of those two-syllable words that the dictionary insists on rendering as three, even though you hardly hear anyone say "o-pen-ing" anymore.
Odd. That's how I say it all the time. Maybe it's an East Coast / West Coast thing. I've sometimes heard people pronounce the noun like "ope-ning", but never the gerund. ("Evening", on the other hand, I always hear as two syllables for the time of day, and three syllables otherwise.)
Evidently, there are places where the norm is different, so I take back my label of "ordinary way". Other than that, everything still applies. You should hyphenate to reflect your intended pronunciation, which in your case is clearly "ope-ning".
On the apostrophe question, if the apostrophe looks better to you, go ahead and do "op'-ning". So long as you have the apostrophe before the hyphen rather than after, it's equally correct. My advice would be against the apostrophe, simply because it's less clear to the singer. A singer with impaired attention (eg, sight reading, bad light, eyes on the conductor, eyes on the cute horn player, just plain stupid, etc.) might overlook it and sing "op" instead of "ope". How much this matters to you might depend on the conditions under which your music will be used. If it's going to be studied and memorized, then maybe you don't care about quick-and-dirty readability.
mdl
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