Comments on Music 03/07/24

Matt is now focusing mostly on ‘musicality’. There are two main subdivisions, pronunciation and moving forward.

The type of pronunciation he is looking for seems to be the pronunciation dialect used by the most uppity upper class in the area around London. It goes by several names; “received pronunciation”, “Queen’s English”, and “BBC English”. London is a seaport, so it is also home to some other dialects that are very difficult for outsiders to understand.

Vowel pronunciation is a concern of Matt. Vowels should be ‘tall’ with the chin dropped so that the inside of the mouth is ‘tall’ and the lips should be circular and almost in a duck-lips configuration. Drop your jaw and open your mouth to avoid a nasal twang. On longer notes, do not close to an ending consonant until the end of the note. This is particularly important with an ending ‘s’ to avoid the dreaded snake pit sound. In longer notes containing a diphthong (long ‘I’, actually ‘ah-ee’, or ‘ou’ in ‘hour’, pronounced ‘ow-uh’) don’t change to the second vowel sound until the end of the note. Don’t chew ending ‘r’ but just barely pronounce it. ‘The’ is never pronounced ‘theh’. Before a word beginning with a consonant, it is pronounced ‘thuh’; before a word beginning with a vowel sound, it is pronounced ‘thee’ (note that ‘hour’ begins with a vowel sound). ‘Our’ is pronounced like ‘hour’, not like ‘arrh’. ‘Your’ is pronounced to rhyme with ‘tour’, not like ‘yore’ or ‘yer’.

Moving forward includes techniques to make the music sound like a conversation, not like a robotic recital of the words. The text in the music is hyphenated like it would be in a dictionary but it may need to be sung differently. For example, ‘forever’ is hyphenated as ‘for-ev-er’ but it should be sung as ‘faw-reh-vuh’. Volume should be fairly constant as indicated by the music (or our Fearless Leader} but it should vary slightly as it does in normal speech. For example, in the word ‘volume’, ‘vol’ is slightly louder than ‘ume’. Typically, don’t break in the middle of a long phrase unless indicated by the music or our Fearless Leader. If you need to sneak a breath, it is better to omit a syllable to take the breath so that you don’t come back in later than the rest of the chorus.