ac-CEN-tu-ate the positive

The sounds of words matter.  Diction matters.  When we sing, lots of emphasis is put on purity of vowels for good vocal production and accuracy of consonants for clarity of pronunciation.  I'd like to take a moment to reflect on how we perceive diction.

My voice teacher in undergrad was a petite blonde soprano from Texas.  Can you imagine the assumptions people made about her?  A southern accent alone is enough to make people assume your brain works slowly, so being female, blonde, and small were just confirmation of what her accent had already told them, right?

Wrong.

It's hard to say exactly what "correct" American English sounds like, because even news broadcasters vary.  And American English has gone through major changes in the past hundred years, as you can tell from any old movie.  It was more rigid in England, where elocution was taught to kids.

After thirty years of Doctor Who (I told you I'd talk about him somehow!), Christopher Eccleston was the first Doctor to have a northern accent.  Sort of like a southern accent in America, it is sometimes equated with ignorance or stupidity--like having a thick regional accent means you haven't learned how to speak "properly."  Anyway, he thought the Doctor having a northern accent would demonstrate that the accent doesn't matter, only the content of the speech.  Of course the Doctor could be northern ("lots of planets have a North."), it doesn't make him any less brilliant.

I love that he values the specificity of the sound of language and honors the regional distinctions which make words personal and colorful in their expression.  Not just in terms of sociological expectations, but in terms of how we hear expression in words.  The best composers honor that by setting texts in ways that sing like they speak.  Bach and Brahms in German, Barber in American English, and Britten in British English all have names starting with B.  I wonder if having a name that starts with B gives you some kind of leg-up in terms of perceiving words... I mean you grow up with B in your last name, making you say it far more frequently than anyone without a B in their name would.  Hm.  Anyway, they are all spectacular at setting texts that sing like they speak, of using the sounds of words and music, and the sounds of music as poetry.

And if there's one singer who uses language and its sounds with expressive specificity, it's Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.  Mmmhh...