On Oct 17, 2006, at 11:39 PM, dc wrote:
All singers don't agree with this. Many are simply used to the "old-fashioned" system and don't want to change.
True.
This can also be confusing in certain languages (Italian) if you also eliminate hyphens, because there are many cases where one note gets what would normally count as two syllables. The only indication of syllabification is then the slurs...
I'm not sure I follow you. Where the older system provides a visual cue lacking in the new system is when one syllable is assigned to more than one note (ie, a melisma), not when one note is assigned to more than one syllable. In the latter case, there are no slurs nor should there be.
By the way, if you're talking about Italian words like "Dio" or "sua", I would argue that the singer would do well to stop thinking of it as a two-syllable word. There's a reason the Italian composers (almost) always put words like that on a single note and it's because the style and tradition is to sing it like a single syllable.
This was often a dilemma for me in my days as a chorus director for opera. Any time there was a word like "Dio", inevitably someone would raise a hand and ask where they should put the "o". On the one hand, it's a reasonable question, because you really don't want your i's and o's misaligned throughout the chorus; but on the other hand, I knew that as soon as I gave an answer, the entire chorus would proceed to sing it as if it were a two-syllable word, which I emphatically didn't want. (The one that sticks in my head, and still makes me cringe to this day, is from the opening scene of Verdi's Otello, where the chorus reaches a climactic fortissimo on the phrase "Dio, fulgor della bufera!", a magnificent line which is inevitably and horribly violated when sung as "Dee-Oh!")
The problem, I think, is in anglophones' perception of Italian. If the chorus were singing an English text and the word "joy" were on a long note, I would fully expect to tell the chorus exactly where I want them to close to the "y", but without fear that doing so would turn the word into "joe-ee".
But I digress. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
