Episode 61

It's the time of year when opera seasons and school years start, so it's time for The Diction Police to get back on track, too! This week and next our topic is English Diction with British baritone Simon Neal, who is here in Dresden singing in Henze's opera We Come To The River. Our text for today is A. E. Housman's "Loveliest of Trees" and we concentrate on the multiple phonetic functions of the letter O in English, final Y in words like "twenty" and "fifty" and a little bit about legato singing and consonants. A. E. Housman was Professor of Latin at Cambridge famous for his studies and research in his field, but he was also a poet most famous to us for his book of poetry A Shropshire Lad from which we get "Loveliest of Trees". After being turned down by several publishers, he published it himself, and it has become a favorite source of texts for many composers, so you'll find many settings of "Loveliest of Trees": the Butterworth that Simon mentions I found on YouTube with John Shirley-Quirk and Martin Isepp plus many student performances of the John Duke version (which is the one I have in my ears, not Celius Dougherty as I thought!). For anyone who needs the visual since I didn't talk about what the letters look like, the phonetic letters that come up on this episode are:

• [ʌ] the stressed version of the English schwa--called an upside down V, but was originally an A without the crossbar
• [ə] a regular schwa, which in English is related to an A sound
• [ɑ] dark A (but I want you to sing them bright [a] !)
• [ɒ] the upside down dark A--this occurs in British English, not in American. For a refresher on this, check out Episode 57 and Jason Nedecky's worksheet on pronunciation shifts between British Received Pronunciation and American Standard specifically under "short O"
• [ɪ] open I
• [o] closed O, which is not as closed and round as German or French
• [ʊ] open U (which I keep calling the "cookie" vowel)
• [u] closed U, which is not as closed and round as German or French

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact me here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter @dictionpolice or you can email me directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com