On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 1:56 PM, David Kastrup <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hayden Muhl <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > Regardless of musical style, you should never* see text set like this.
> >
> > For unto us a child is bo_______________________________rn
> >
> > How you handle final consonants is going to be part of the stylistic
> > convention of the music you're performing and personal choice.
>
> In Italian maybe. In English, "rn" is necessary to figure out the vowel
> you are supposed to be singing in the first place. Fortunately, at
> least the punctuation can't influence the phonetic value half a word
> earlier.
No, not even in Italian. It is always important to have the full context of
the syllable when singing a melismatic phrase. Imagine if you saw this in
your music.
tor - na_________________
Only to turn the page and see
_____________r
"Torna" and "tornar" are both valid words. It does the singer a disservice
to hide the end of the word at the end of the extension line.
While pronunciation of vowels do not depend on their trailing consonants in
Italian as much as they do in English, putting the consonant at the end of
the extension line can still serve to hide important information. The
syllabification of double consonants in Italian puts the first of the two
consonants on the previous syllable, and the second on the latter syllable.
The syllabification of "anno" would look like "an - no". The consonant at
the end of a syllable is treated differently than a consonant at the
beginning of a syllable, so it is important for the singer to know that
this will be coming. Failing to pronounce the double consonant correctly
turns the word "anno" (year) into "ano" (anus).
One corner case I have seen is where there is a final syllable on a grace
not after the melisma. So, instead of "tor - nar________" you might have
something like "tor - na - - - - re". This may have been in a French song,
but I can't remember. Even so, it was a case of telling the singer how to
treat the final syllable of a word, not how to treat the final consonant of
a syllable.
I suppose one place where printing "bo___rn" and "na___r" might be of use
is in an instructional book for beginning singers to illustrate how to
treat trailing consonants. I would see this as a valid reason for Lilypond
to support this feature, but not a valid reason for publishers to use this
in scores meant to be performed from.
- Hayden
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