When the famous musicologist Donald Jay Grout came to my college, he responded to an homologous question (should Bach be played on a piano, perhaps ???), If it is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. Ray Nurse said we havent had an early music revival, weve had an early instrument revival. I agree that putting the song across is paramount. I dont think early pronunciation is a barrier to that though, especially here in Japan where nobody has a clue about the lyric anyway. Even in English pop, I rarely can understand many of the words just by listening. As a songwriter, I feel that the actual sound of the syllables is very important and rhyme is very important in most songs. I find eye rhyme hard to swallow as a performance practice. My own approach is to compromise (because of my limited linguistic knowledge) and at least bend some of the important words to rhyme. I often compromise in many ways in performance. We are in the entertainment business, after all, even if it is entertaining ourselves.
Ed Durbrow Saitama, Japan http://www.youtube.com/user/edurbrow?feature=watch https://soundcloud.com/ed-durbrow http://www9.plala.or.jp/edurbrow/ -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
