At 9:06 AM -0500 2/22/10, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
Hi all,
Just going over something, and trying to remember which vocal arranger or
company (U.S., mid-20th century) printed English lyrics in supposedly singable
phonetic format to encourage 'proper' singing sounds. I used to have one of
these pieces of sheet music, but can't find it any more.
I'm not talking about dialect pieces or transliterations of non-English text,
but rather standard vocal arrangements using phonetic English lyrics.
Anybody recall these? John Howell, you remember everything. How about you? :)
Yup. It was Fred Waring, and the choral charts published by his
company, Shawnee Press. I'm trying to remember what he called them,
but it escapes me at the moment.
His point (and the way he coached his singers in the Pennsylvanians)
was that to be understandable, choral singers had to (a) pronounce
all the sounds in all the syllables in all the words, and (b) do it
all together at the same millisecond. The Tone Syllables (that may
be what he called them) were his attempt to transfer it to paper, and
it was pretty effective as long as you understood the system and what
it was designed for.
My mom, as a choir director, was invited to attend his summer
rehearsals where he put the touring show together, back in the '40s,
and I grew up with the system. Fred was a real perfectionist (much
like Robert Shaw on the classical side), and could not abide choral
singing when the words couldn't be understood.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[email protected])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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