On May 1, 2007, at 8:18 AM, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:
When I speak, I also say, "eye-urn." I would direct my choir to sing, "ah-ih-ruhn." The difference being the treatment of the diphthong on the first syllable. I think I picked that mode up from Shaw, as a part of his (and mine) never-ending battle to exhort choirs to differentiate between our speaking lives and our singing lives.
That's what I would have figured, too. I gather that you're much more inclined than I am toward Received Pronunciation for everything choral, but I do agree with you about the distinction between spoken English and sung English.
I can understand that certainly sounds regularly get deformed in everyday speech, but each word still has a pronunciation which is understood to be "correct" if the word is enunciated, even if it's acceptable to depart from that pronunciation in ordinary speech. Take a phrase like "what are you going to do?" If you are asked to repeat that enunciating more clearly, you will surely use a very different set of sounds from those you used when you said it the first time. In ordinary speaking, one would say something like "wudderyagunnadoo", but all the while knowing what the "correct" pronunciation of each word really is.
I assumed something similar for "iron". In ordinary speech, my "eye- run" and your "eye-urn" are both blurred to the point where you'd barely notice the difference between them. What makes my wife laugh is when we're playing Boggle. When you read the words from your list, you tend to enunciate them, so when I get "iron" (a word that comes up fairly often in Boggle), I say the "eye-run" quite clearly, and everyone seems to find it very amusing. Even when enunciating, they still say "eye-urn".
-- On May 1, 2007, at 7:33 AM, Ken Moore wrote:
Not exactly, but "eye-ron" is the standard pronunciation in Walton's "Belshazzar's Feast", IIRC.
I was in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus when they did Belshazzar's Feast (one of my all-time favorite choral works, by the way). That was when Vance George was directing the chorus. I remember distinctly that he asked for "eye-euhn". I remember it because I found it a strange choice (even for Vance, who was a master at phonetic trickery -- to the point where he would sometimes ask us to introduce sounds that weren't even in the words at all, knowing that after being distorted by the hall it would result in the right sounds in the audience's ears).
-- On May 1, 2007, at 10:05 AM, John Howell wrote:
Yup. Which means I'm painfully aware of the problems involved in sung English, even without attempting to capture dialect. A special pet peeve of mine is the word "perilous" in The Star Spangled Banner. With the Southwest Virginia (read "country") accent around here, people invariably try to sing the "i" as a schwa--"per-uh-luhs"--which I hate, and I have to coach them to use a short "i"--"pe-rih-luhs." More than half the vowels in English-- all of the unstressed ones--migrate toward schwa in speech, but sound entirely wrong when SUNG as schwa.
What always amazes me in the Banner singers who sing "pair-ruh-liss", singing the two vowels quite clearly but swapping their position. I can't say that's my pet peeve though. My biggest peeve about the Banner is that almost everyone who sings it is just singing syllables and not even attempting to express the text. Admittedly, it's got some convoluted grammar and the text isn't well fitted to the tune at all, but even so, it still has a message. That's pretty much my mantra as coach: tell the story.
I would disagree with your last sentence if I thought you meant it literally, but given some of your earlier statements about IPA vowelsI suspect you're using the term "schwa" loosely as a generic term for neutral vowels and not distinguishing [3], [^], [upside-down omega], [short capital I]. English has several neutral vowels, and schwa is only one of them. In English, unstressed syllables degrade to weaker forms (as they also do in Russian and Portuguese, but not in most other languages), but not always to schwa. Listen to the difference between "Rose's" and "Rosa's" The latter ends with a schwa; the former doesn't.
I think part of good choral coaching is knowing when to have them sing the weak vowel and which one. Just as an example, for "rocket's red glare", I would indeed coach a good "eh" sound for the second syllable of "rocket", in spite of the fact that in ordinary speech that vowel will generally be said as "ih" (not schwa). On the other hand, in God Bless America, I would coach the "ih" sound for the first syllable of "beside" in "stand beside her". I know many choral directors would ask for "ee" there, but I think that would come out affected and "bih" would achieve the desired result. I couldn't tell you exactly why. There's probably some rule to it, but if so I'm not conscious of it. It's just instinctive.
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