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.
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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
