On Sun Dec 4, at SundayDec 4 8:18 PM, Mark D Lew wrote: > On Dec 4, 2011, at 5:10 PM, Christopher Smith wrote: > >> Yet, you have pretty much done that. I kept your long post from a few years >> back, and will add this last bit to it. I have never seen such a clearly >> laid-out presentation of the issues involved in lyric hyphenation. > > Thanks for the compliment. I dimly remember that post. I tried googling for > it, but I couldn't turn up anything. I'd be curious to see what I wrote, if > you care to repost it.
Here it is, complete. I think I remember editing lightly for typos (not many of yours!) and punctuation and removing a few paragraphs that I didn't think were germane. Some of the quoted replied are not clearly delineated in this formatting, but mostly you can follow it. I've sent it as an email attachment to a few students. I hope you approve. Christopher Hyphenation should be according to the way a good dictionary separates the syllables. Even though some dictionaries disagree on certain words (especially those that do not have traditional Latin, Greek, or German roots) you should choose a dictionary and stick to its interpretation consistently. Why not hyphenate according to the way singers are going to pronounce it, with the consonants delayed to the beginning of the next note? Like "fu-nny" instead of the traditional "fun-ny?" Other variations in hyphenation might go unnoticed, but something so obvious as "fu-nny" I expect would be consciously noticed by just about anyone. I've worked with scores using this practice, and my conclusion is that unless it's a special pedagogic edition, it's a bad idea. Singing on the vowel and placing the consonants at the beginning of the next note is a basic singing concept which needs to be learned separately anyway. The collection of singers who would be helped by such a reminder in the hyphenation is a rather small one, I think, sandwiched between those who already understand without extra help and those who wouldn't understand regardless. The more significant effect is to make the text confusing and less readable. If I'm singing a piece and I see "fun-", I know that it's going to be a word like "funny" or "fundamental" and I'm ready to start singing "fuh..." as I continue on to see what's next. If I see "fu-", then it looks like it will be a word like "future" or "fugitive" and I'm ready to start singing "fyoo...." (In practice, all of this is probably happening reading a bar or two ahead, but the principle is the same.) Traditional hyphenation really is an indicator of pronunciation, albeit imperfect. The placement of consonants relative to the hyphen is a strong predictor of vowel pronunciation. Consider, e.g., "dem-o-crat-ic" vs "de-moc-ra-cy". In questionable cases, a good guide to follow is to consider which hyphenation makes it easier to anticipate pronunciation of the first syllable alone. Thus, one would choose "ev-er" and "e-ven", but "o-ver" and "ov-en". On first glance, that looks inconsistent, but in fact it reflects the pronunciation perfectly. On Wednesday, December 17, 2003, at 07:34 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote: Is it still customary when entering lyrics to use an apostrophe and dropped vowel to indicate a "merged" syllable in English (i.e., where the word as sung has fewer syllables than the dictionary hyphenation)? Or is that an archaic practice? In other words, should a two-syllable "opening" be written "o-pening" or "o-p'ning" For this example, I would choose "o-p'ning". I don't know that I'd generalize that as a rule to always use apostrophe, though. In other contexts it might be clearer to spell out what looks like two syllables but is pronounced as one. This is assuming that the melody is using the word in an ordinary way. If one is deliberately putting a space in the middle of the word with the "p" sound before the break -- as in "another ope-ning, another show..." -- then that's a special effect calling for a special hyphenation. In that case, I would use "ope-ning" -- or alternatively "op'-ning", but definitely not "op-'ning". I don't like "op-'ning" (as another poster recommended) under any circumstances, because I think it encourages the singer to pronounce the first syllable as one would in "op-era", "op-tion", or "op-por-tu-ni-ty". An important function of hyphen placement in English -- the most important, I'd say -- is to indicate, by the presence or absence of a consonant at the end of a syllable, whether the syllable's vowel should be short or long. The comparison to "ev-'ning" makes no sense to me. "Evening" is a two-syllable word to begin with, so it is properly "eve-ning" or, if you insist on an apostrophe, "ev'-ning". If you really are using a contraction of the less common three-syllable word (ie, the gerund or participle of the verb "even"), then it should indeed be "e-v'ning". I can't think of any case in which "ev-'ning" is proper. -- To put it another way, which perhaps can serve as a general guideline, imagine that you're seeing only the letters that appear before the hyphen: What would you sing? If you see, "o-", it rhymes with "hoe". If you see, "op-", it rhymes with "hop". If you see, "ope-", it rhymes with "hope". If you see, "op'-", it still rhymes with "hope" if you're careful, but it's easy to overlook the apostrophe and say "hop" by mistake. Likewise for "e-", "ev-", "eve-" and "ev'-" in the various permutations of "evening". For example, if you want "lever" to rhyme with "fever", as the British say it, then you should write it "le-ver"; if you want "lever" to rhyme with "never", as the Americans say it, then you should write "lev-er". Likewise for "pro-gress" vs "prog-ress", "pri-vacy" vs "priv-acy", etc. I suppose two syllables in "fire" would be pronounced more or less "Fie-yer" with the short "e" sustained, not "Fie-yerrrrr" with the "r" sustained. It IS sung differently than a melisma would be; "Fah-ire". I honestly don't know how to notate the difference. If I see "fire" written as one syllable, slurred over two or more notes of melisma, then I assume the default interpretation is that every syllable but the last has the "ah" vowel sound and the last includes the entire "ire" sound. A clear example of this is the long melisma in #5 of Handel's Messiah, "and the desi-i-i-i-i-i-ire of all nations shall come". This is consistent with what basic "correct" choral diction would dictate for any diphthong. It would sound ludicrous to sing the final syllable of the melisma on a sustained "errr" sound, and I can't imagine anyone, not even an unschooled singer, would think to try it. In other examples where two or more notes are slurred over a single syllable of "fire", it does feel natural to make the first syllable "fye" and sing a sustained "er" over the second (so that it rhymes with "buyer"). An example of this is the first line of the 1940s song, "I don't want to set the world on fire". Absent any tradition of how one has heard it sung before, I would guess that some singers would choose to sing "fire" like "fye-er" but some others would sing it as a single syllable like in the first example. For this particular song, my personal choice would be to sing it like "fye-er". I think it's what the composer intended, and it's consistent with the style in which I would sing this song, which is a more colloquial pronunciation not at all like proper choral diction. Nevertheless, if I were editing the song I would not actually write out "fire" as two syllables. (Nor would I write "want to" as "wanna", even though I would surely sing it that way.) I would rather leave those choices for each singer's styling and instincts, and if some other singers choose to sing "fire" differently, so be it. As we all know from numerous examples, the same song can be successfully interpreted in drastically different styles and for someone else singing in a different style my two-syllable interpretation of "fye-er" might sound ridiculous. I tend to believe a similar argument is going to cover almost any situation. Even if you intend "fire" to be sung as two syllables, you can notate it as one and leave it to the singer's instincts to agree or not agree. But I tend to like to give performers freedom to interpret, and I know that not all composers are like that, so I can see that a case might arise where one really does want to explicitly indicate two syllable. Also, you might have a case where you really want to emphasize a certain rhythm. Suppose you're setting syllables in a steady pattern of eighth notes, but to continue the pattern properly you want "fire" on two eighth notes. If those two eighth notes are on the same note, it won't do at all to make it a quarter note because that would suggest a distinct change in the rhythm. You could slur the two eighth notes together anyway, and put "fire" as a single syllable below. That might communicate the idea, but for such a case I think you'd rather indicate the two syllables more explicitly. So supposing you really do need to write "fire" as two syllables, how do you do it? I've seen it written as "fi-re". I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but I'm sure I've seen it more than once, and I'm pretty sure at least one was in a well-established score (something G&S maybe?) It's an imperfect solution, but I think it's understandable in context, none of the alternatives are perfect either, and there seems to be at least some tradition for it, so I would be comfortable using it if I ever faced the situation. It's not that much different from hyphenating "i-ron" and expecting it to be sung as "eye-urn". Side note: Personally, I pronounce "i-ron" like "eye-ruhn" even in ordinary speech, and it is a source of ongoing amusement to my wife to point out that everyone else in the world says "eye-urn". Surely I'm not the only one. Does anyone else out there say "eye-ruhn"? I also pronounce "comfortable" as four syllable, more or less as written. That one my wife says the same as I do, but we're in the minority against those who say is as three syllables like "comf-ter-ble". Now there's an interesting puzzle. Suppose your lyric has "comfortable" and you want it to be sung in the common way on three syllables, how would you spell/hyphenate that? There's a local ad on TV here with a jingle that ends with something like "for a reasonable price", but "reasonable" is sung like "reez-nuh-ble", with each of the first two syllables held over a long note. It doesn't bother me, but it drives my wife crazy. (And sometimes It amuses me to sing it at her just to make her squirm.) That one I suppose you could write as "reas'-na-ble". French French is one of the harder languages for word division, but there are basic rules which will take you pretty far. 1. When the syllable divides on a single consonant between vowels, always break before the consonant 2. When the syllable divides on two consonants, break between the two consonants, UNLESS: - the pair is GN, CH, PH, RH, or TH. - the second consonant is L or R, and the first consonant is *not* L, M, N or R. If it meets one of those exceptions, keep the consonants together and break before them. 3. When the syllable divides on three consonants, break between the first and second consonant of the three. No doubt there are exceptions, but off the of my head I can't think of any exception to those rules. The basic idea is to keep any consonantal digraph together and keep any pair that's a hard consonant followed by and liquid together. If there were a DL or TL pair, those should probably be split, but I can't think of any such word. Likewise, I'd split GN if the G is pronounced hard, but I can't think of any word like that either. If there were three consonants together and the third one isn't L or R, I'd rethink that, too, but I can't think of such a word. If the syllable divides between vowels, it should be intuitive from the pronunciation. Any vowel pair pronounced as a digraph should stay together. Also, I would never break after an apostrophe. And when a word ending in a weak -e is followed by a word starting with a vowel, don't make a syllable out of it just to elide it. So: Au clair de la lu-ne, Mon a-mi Pier-rot Prê-te moi ta plu-me Pour é-crire un mot Ma chan-delle est mor-te Je n'ai plus de feu Ou-vre-moi ta por-te Pour l'a-mour de Dieu! On Dec 3, 2011, at 9:40 AM, John Howell wrote: I agree with Mark in principle, but in practice it can be a real can of worms! The problem he cites with English words in long melismas is a real one, simply because in English each vowel had a number of possible pronunciations, unlike several other common languages, and the singer has to decide which one to use right at the beginning of the word. True, but the majority of these vowel issues can be reduced to questions of short and long, and these are exactly the ones hyphenation rules address pretty well. (Indeed, English hyphenation is complicated precisely because of the existence of long and short vowels.) The general rule is that if a vowel is short, you should keep the following consonant with it, and if the vowel is long you should break after the vowel. This is logically tied to how English spelling and pronunciation evolved, and readers perceive it instinctively even if they don't consciously identify short and long vowels. Even if you've never thought about it explicitly, your entire reading experience tells you that a short vowel sound never comes at the end of a word, and that when a word ends in a consonant the vowel is almost never long. Thus the singer instinctively observes the same pattern with single syllables presented alone. The same principle covers most vowels -- even some that aren't strictly short or long but follow a similar pattern. I find the worst problems are with soft c's or g's that fall at the end of an accented syllable, (eg, pac-ify, dec-i-mate, reg-i-ster, log-i-cal). There's really no good answer to those. But it can create just as much confusion to "creatively" mis-hyphenate words in an ATTEMPT to write down what you think singers should sing. I run into this fairly often in my Vocal/Choral Arranging class, especially when the students are instrumentalists and not used to seeing vocal music or thinking about hyphenation. They try to "write it the way it sounds," and end up with gobbledegook that would confound ANY singers trying to sightread it! I absolutely agree on this. We discussed it on this list once before. I think pedagogic schemes involving pseudo-phonetic spellings or pushing all the consonants to the next syllable as a vocal exercise make things worse. They're fine for lesson context where you're teaching specific skills to singers, but for regular music no. I also dislike phonetic schemes for languages with non-Latin alphabets, like Russian. If you're not going to learn the alphabet (which is best), it's still far better to have a transliteration system that accurately reflects the logic of the native alphabet. I've been writing vocal charts for upwards of 60 years, and I strongly advise using normal, dictionary hyphenation in ALMOST every case. It comes under "better the devil you know ..." I agree, but that implies there is a single "normal, dictionary" system, which isn't the case. British publishing has traditionally followed a derivation-based hyphenation system for word divisions, while American publishing follows a pronunciation-based system. The "American" system has gained ground even in Britain, but many reputable publications still consider the "British" system correct. I would say that the American system (i.e., pronunciation-based) is always preferred for vocal music. (For non-musical prose, I personally prefer the "British" system, which, incidentally, would never break after a soft c or soft g.) And for anyone who hasn't worked with lyrics in other languages, guess what: the hyphenation rules are completely different!!! But there ARE rules. And I think my Mom knew them all. Of the languages frequently encountered in classical music, English is by far the hardest to hyphenate in (for the same reason it's hardest to spell in). Even French, which has some complicated spellings, is fairly easy to hyphenate, and other common languages in the classical repertoire are easier still. I'm pretty sure I could lay out a clear set of rules for hyphenating in French, German, Italian, Latin, or Spanish. Writing up a comprehensive set of rules for English would be a challenge. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
