On Friday, December 19, 2003, at 10:23 AM, Phil Daley wrote:
I am arriving late on this thread. So maybe this has been said 100 times already:
Dictionary hyphenation is for English students and writers.
Singers need to have the consonants put at the beginning of the syllable they are singing.
The two different hyphenations have pretty much nothing to do with each other.
I think the Fred Waring arrangements used to have some "symbolic" pronunciation guide below the text. I believe it has a name, but I don't remember it.
I've seen that sort of thing before. Not only do you hyphenate every word before the consonant, but you even shove the consonants ending the previous word onto the following syllable. So that chorus from Messiah ends up looking like " A - - nd.wi - - th.Hi - - s.stri - - pes.we -- are -- hea -- led"
I think it's an interesting notion, but ultimately I don't find it useful. Yes, of course, that is how the chorus ought to sing it, but if it's a well-trained chorus, the singers already know this. If it's not a well-trained chorus, then the singers are simply baffled by the peculiar odd spellings until you take the trouble to explain it to them, by which time you may as well have just explained to them to sing consonants at the beginning of the next note.
I still say you're inviting trouble to move a consonant after the hyphen when it doesn't properly belong there. You will make people mispronounce the word. This is not just a theory, it's something I've witnessed on multiple occasions (mostly in rehearsal, thankfully) -- 90% of the chorus singing "ree" instead of "reh", or "proh" instead of "prah", because an improperly hyphenated word went over a page break.
mdl
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