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For choral ensembles, articulation is really a matter of diction.
Here's Daniel Huff talking about the issue.
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I Know here at Carolina, there are whole classes on diction.
So we're going to summarize it now in about five to ten minutes.
>> [LAUGH] Sure we are.
[LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] Can you tell us some of the big issues
that we need to worry about, especially if we're a non-singer?
Or dealing with an amateur ensemble.
>> Well there's diction to singers means one thing, and
diction in the common sense of the term means another.
So we'll try and separate them.
Diction from the standpoint of clarity, that is, you can understand it.
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Generated through the valves and the way we
rec, we regulate that, we interrupt that through
the consonants which may or may not carry
tone as voice consonants or as unvoice consonants.
So for instance one of the problems with the understandability side of diction is
that if the lagado is so extreme that people never hear the vowel being divided.
Then what you have is a massive one vowel whatever it is
with just a big massive maybe gorgeous sound, but nonetheless a big mass.
>> And in a in an instrumental point of
view we would say that the articulation is bad.
>> Exactly right.
>> We, we can't stand hear any articulation [CROSSTALK].
>> That's exactly right.
So, you would articulate.
In that sense of the term you would articulate for clarity and texture.
>> Okay.
>> And generally speaking, I'd say it's fair to say that the
larger the numbers, the more you have to work for greater articulation.
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For instance, if you've got just four people singing an SATB piece as a chamber
piece, then they can be extremely legato and
it'll still be fairly understandable because they're going to
be so close to each other in proximity and they're so, they can have it's
easy for them to gain uniformity and precision
of articulation, and they'll still sound wonderfully legato.
In a large choral, like if you have a hundred
voices, you almost have to put gaps in between things,
because it takes time for that kind of sound to
dissipate so that you hear it as being a separate sound.
So there lots of people play all kinds of games, you know, doing that.
I ordinarily work in a choir of about 30 or 32 to 34, around in through there.
So, I'm primarily interested.
I'm, I'm in a fairly enviable position in the sense that I'm
lucky if I can get them to sing open sounds and flow.
And so, articulation isn't something that I worry
about except where I come back to it,
and I say, well that's a gorgeous sound, but I can't tell what you just said.
3:03
So there's that side.
Then, there's the diction side from the
singer's side, which is how you reproduce languages.
It's obvious that not everybody can be fluid in
all the languages that you might want to speak in or
sing in, especially if your goal is to explore all
of these alternative cultural practices, which we talked about earlier.
>> Yeah.
>> So, there's a system that singers
use called the International, International phonetic alphabet.
It's commonly available as a source.
It can be linked to the vowels that we were talking about.
So you can see how different vowels and different languages can
be represented in terms of how they're placed in your face.
It's called the vowel trapezoid.
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And all of these things are commonly available on, on the internet.
You can Google search that, and find all that sort of stuff.
And I think it's important for anybody who's a working conductor to have
some familiarity with the international phonetic
alphabet so that they can represent the
sounds that they want across a broad culturally up, a broad spectrum of
different culturally iterations using a common language
so that they can produce the sounds.
For instance, there's a high case, there's a forward and a backward And, you
know, we would say the word father, for instance, that would be one thing.
And we would say God, that would be a very different thing, and
they're basically broadly conceived in 'a' about, or a variant of an 'a' about.
But they're placed completely differently in the face, you know?
The 'a' vowel is low and forward.
'A', as in father, 'a' vowel is low and back.
And you can say [SOUND].
Those are, that's a back vowel and a forward vowel at the top, all
the way back and all the forward and you can hear how it changes.
>> Yeah.
>> And that's the vowel envelope problem.
So, and one way when you talk about creating vowels and
tone, you're talking about the problem of diction from a singer's standpoint.
And in another way when you talk about diction, you're
talking about it in your sense of the term which is
articulation, which is how you, how you use the consonants
to divide those tones that you worked so hard to create.
Fairly different problems, but they're one and the same with the choir.
And like I said, size magnifies the problem.
>> Right.
>> If you have, if you go from 30 singers
to 60 singers your problems go up with the numbers.
>> Right, and it's just, almost the same in the, in the instrumental world
where the amount of players can determine
the kind of problems that we're dealing with.
>> Mm-hm.
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>> Dan I wonder if you can outline maybe the top
diction pitfalls that you encounter and that we might also encounter.
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>> Well aside from misshapen bubbles which is
a common one, commonly people jut their chin
and click and close their mouth, and that
stops the vowel from forming where ever it is.
>> What would that sound like to us if we're.
>> Aaaah.
Aaaah.
>> As opposed to?
>> Aaaah.
Aaaah.
You can hear the basic geometry shift.
If you put your fingers right here on both sides of
your Larynx you can feel where the vowel is going to be shaped.
If you keep your chin forward and tilted up, you can feel that little stretch.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Now, you fundamentally changed, essentially, you're
taking a trumpet and holding it out straight.
You've got a straight tube, and tilted it off
axis, and that has a profound impact on the tongue.
>> So we can, we can, kind of analyse that by
both listening and by watching what our singers are doing.
>> Yeah, yes.
>> Okay.
>> Another thing that people do is they
tend to spread, so they'll take the vowels [SOUND]
or cover [SOUND], and they're changing the length
of the column of air by extending their lips.
But that isn't the same as actually changing the vowel,
where it needs to be changed, which is in the tongue.
A third thing that people will do
is they'll mis-time multiple combinations of vowels.
For instance, one of the things that you
always run into hear is classically called a diphthong.
>> Mm-hm.
>> A word, for instance, like well we, we talked about spacious earlier.
That's got an eh, e, spacious- >> Yeah.
>> Spacious, and you can, you have choices.
You can either spacious skies where you articulate them
both, that would be the closest to to, vernacular English.
>> Speak English.
>> Or you can in the Latin for instance you
can say In Te Domine where you In Te, In Te
you stop it short of it and you form the eh
sound but you don't eh ee it you don't diphthong it.
So you have a lot of people who will miss form
diphthongs there are even worse ones like ooh like the word down.
Is o, u.
So you have O and W, but you're pronouncing it an and o, and an u.
You have three vowels in there which form that, that word.
And if you go halfway to them in a choir, I mean, it wouldn't matter
if you said down or down or whatever, I wouldn't know what you were saying.
Particularly because we know each other and we would read the context broadly.
But if you and I say it together and you go further into
that diphthong than I go into it, then we have a different vowel envelope.
>> M-hm.
>> And different vowel envelopes mean we have colliding sets
of frequencies, which essentially can never be made to sound good.
Never can be made to sound unified.
>> Yeah.
>> The idea of being in a choir is that A, you have to train.
That's why I mentioned earlier about the vowels.
You train, you vocalize the concept of a vowel
into them, and then you apply it specifically in locations.
The problem of ensemble is managing how you choose to do it artistically.
In other words, are you going to use the
vernacular and sing the diphthong, and if so,
everybody has to change from the primary vowel
to the secondary vowel at precisely the same time.
And even if you don't, if you've decided
that you're not going to sing the secondary vowel,
then everybody has to go right up to it, cut it with the consonant and go on.
It's, it, that's, those are questions of,
advanced questions of ensembleness as opposed to vowels.
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A third thing that, or another thing that people need to pay
specific attention to is consonants that affect the vowel that precedes them.
One of the most common ones is an R.
R is called the retroflexive, and it bends the vowel that precedes it back.
If you pinpoint your tongue and go [SOUND].
You see how your tongue shifts back?
>> Yeah.
>> Okay.
If we think, say the [SOUND], you feel that go back.
>> Yeah.
>> A way to get around that instead of
using an r in, in romance languages other than English,
non-English, then you can do either, you should flip
an R, one flip, intervocalic R is what it's called.
So you pop it.
In English, if you are singing in vernacular, you can raise it
to a neutral schwa, high case neutral schwa, so you say chair.
Chair, and it'll go forehead as it goes ba, instead of going backwards.
So, I'm saying chair, chair.
So I'm singing, heavy eh.
No diphthong.
No, no i, in that.
Chair, it's going forward, chair.
And at the last second, you toss it back.
Those are the most common, and annoying, things.
10:20
Secondly or lastly, I'd say that style kind of trumps everything.
So if you're singing any kind of vernacular, for instance,
a lot of people sing spirituals with very sharply voiced consonants.
Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho.
Joshua Fit The Battle, Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho.
Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho.
It, it changes, it mixes the, it mixes two totally different styles of
pronunciation and makes it impossible to, to become stylistic.
Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho, you stop all those T's and let them flow together.
The two T's in battle almost become D's.
Battle of, battle of, battle of and it'll carry pitch, and you
get the percussiveness in that kind of a sound comes, comes to
the J, Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho, Josh Fit The Battle
of Jericho, and falls right into the, falls right into the syncopation pattern.
Whereas if you go Joshua Fit The battle of Jericho then
you get [UNKNOWN] you know, feel like you're stuttering to yourself.
Dr. Evan FeldmanAssociate Professor & Wind Ensemble Conductor
