Dear David,
I think that it is very unfortunate that early pronunciation has not
become a more essential part of performing practice. If one looks at the
work carried out by David Crystal and his son Ben, notably for the Globe
Theatre productions of Shakespeare, the benefits seem to far outweigh
the disadvantages. The texts actually become more intelligible to the
audience who hear them, with many puns and rhymes suddenly coming to the
fore. It is, after all, somewhat of an aberration to consider Received
Pronunciation as the norm for performing 16th century theatre; it is
estimated that only 2% of the present UK population actually speak it
and the term itself was only coined in the late 19th century, not coming
to the fore until the 1920s.
We pride ourselves on using carefully crafted copies of early
instruments with appropriate authentic style stringing, we study and
compare facsimiles of original works to create faithful performing
editions, we read treatises on performance practice and adopt unequal
temperaments and yet we are happy to carry on using totally
anachronistic pronunciation.
At a round table on performance practice of Dowland three or four years
ago, Anthony Rooley and Emma Kirkby discussed their early attempts at
adopting period pronunciation. They became discouraged by the fact that
there were several possible period accents to chose from but admitted
that probably the next step in getting closer to 'authentic' performance
was to devote more time and study to singing with original
pronunciation. Some singers, such as Charles Daniels and Catherine King,
have gone down that path. Obviously it will take years of general
practice to arrive at a totally convincing result since singing in such
a fashion must become totally ingrained and seem as natural as possible
(just as it has taken several decades of performance practice to make
period ornamentation totally seamless - some of the early attempts at
'trillo', for example, were pretty risible).
Best,
Matthew
On 23/04/2017 21:11, David van Ooijen wrote:
In HIP lute song performance, you can choose for early English
pronunciation, but this is very difficult to do, not so clear about how
to pronounce exactly, and not so clear for a modern audience to
understand. So there is a strong argument in favour of modern English
pronunciation of lute song. Robert Spencer, one of my teachers, was
strongly in favour of modern pronunciation for reasons of
communication: performing lute songs is about giving your audience the
text, not the sounds. But for a little later songs, like Purcell, I
think it's nice to try, as here the sound of the language is so much a
part of the composition. On the other hand, the greatest changes in
English pronunciation are already past by the time of Purcell. For what
I know of it, anyway. I'm sure someone can - and will! - correct me
here.
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
