But I agree with you wholeheartedly! But then, I like to read Le Morte d'Arthur in its original; not everyone's cup of tea, you'd have to agree. One of my pet peeves is that everybody in early music is a specialist these days (well, was, but that's another pet peeve) except for the singers. All this effort from us, poor instrumentalists, and then a modern singer comes along and spoils it all by saying something stupid like (oeps, wrong lyrics ...). Anyway, you get my drift. But still, there's a strong argument for modern pronunciation in lute song, because most (I think) people will get more from a modern version of Elizabethan English. That's all. David
******************************* David van Ooijen [1]davidvanooi...@gmail.com [2]www.davidvanooijen.nl ******************************* On 23 April 2017 at 22:13, Matthew Daillie <[3]dail...@club-internet.fr> wrote: 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 [4]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. mailto:davidvanooi...@gmail.com 2. http://www.davidvanooijen.nl/ 3. mailto:dail...@club-internet.fr 4. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html