Episode 57

The Diction Police is now officially in its third year! Thank you so much to all listeners around the world--the audience has more than doubled in its second year, and I'd love to say that again next year, so I'm asking everyone to please spread the word: share on Facebook, post and write comments on the Facebook page, tweet on Twitter, send the link to your singer/coach friends and post comments on iTunes so that more people can find The Diction Police and benefit from it! Thank you! This week and next our topic will be English Diction, concentrating on the differences between American Standard English (AS) and British Received Pronunciation (RP). Canadian baritone and diction specialist Jason Nedecky is with us to discuss the Thomas Hardy poem "Before Life and After", focusing on the initial WH whine/wine rule [w] vs. [ʍ], the prefixes RE-, PRE- and BE- and the vowel shifts that occur between AS and RP English, including when [æ] becomes [ɑ], when [ɑ] or [ʌ] become the upside down dark A [ɒ] and when the American dark A [ɑ] becomes open O [ɔ] in RP. "Before Life and After" is the final song in Benjamin Britten's song cycle Winter Words, a set of 8 Thomas Hardy poems. Hardy was a Victorian Realist author, probably most famous for his novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but he also wrote 947 poems--all of his works are available online at the Thomas Hardy Society. Jason was kind enough to allow me to post a worksheet that he uses in his course, entitled "English Diction: Pronunciation Shifts in Singing", which is posted in this blog entry. The dictionary that we mention is Longman Pronunciation Dictionary--from what I could tell online, it seems that the 2nd edition has phonetics but the 3rd edition has transcriptions. I've ordered the second edition, but if anyone has access to the 3rd edition, please report back as to its usefulness! And of course, we mention Madeleine Marshall's The Singer's Manual of English Diction. Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, on the Facebook page, on Twitter @dictionpolice or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com UPDATE: Jason has assured me that the 3rd edition of the Longman has phonetics!