Chapter 8

Styles and Dialects—The Social
Element of Interpretation

Singing style is a mode or manner of vocal utterance which gives distinctive character and eloquence¹ to artistic expression. A tool of diction it involves the word (See p. 5.), which conveys the intimacy of meaning and personal intent. Styles of singing tend to be directed by the musical structure. Songs of the Baroque and Classical Periods demand a disciplined respect for the musical line that may confine the meaning and intent of the word within strict emotional boundaries, while romantic music removes these boundaries. Such disciplines are social restraints or freedoms that compel a singer to assume a style or manner when singing the songs of a particular form or period. However, a compelling social force which directs the establishment of style is the emulation of an ideal.

The reputable, cultured singer has a profound impact upon the diction of the vocal proletariat. When a singer becomes recognized nationally or even locally, his diction style of phonemic utterance is imitated in the area of his success.

Kantner and West describe the aspects of style thus, “There are two aspects of any style: the example set by the leader, and the emulation of that example by a significantly large body of followers. Until both of these aspects are manifest, no style has been created.”²

Musical society, then, is divided into two distinct groups, leaders and followers. A vocal utterance, when first brought to the attention of the listening mass or follower group, will probably be accepted if the leader is popular enough, if he has the prestige of a national television show, or if the style is accepted by a prestige group and it uses the style with regularity. Examples of such musical styles are the singing of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Julie London, Barbra Streisand, Cab Calloway, and so on.

Each of these styles is in a state of change. Each is determined by the personality of the singer and by the receptivity of the follower group. Thus, one style may express the studied rustic colloquial speech of the country. Another may have the sophistication of the well-tailored nightclub entertainer who creates his own interpretation of any popular melody or show tune.

In the United States and Europe, acceptable styles of artful diction are those set by the cultured group of leaders in opera, concert stage, and oratorio. Yet even this group, when singing in English, tends to use aspects of the General American dialect, notably the General American [ɝ] [veɝI] or [maɝI] instead of the flipped [ɾ]. If members of this group continue to sing this vowelized [ɝ], it may in time be considered quite the proper vowel for singing. Style, then, is a transient characteristic, wholly susceptible to the impact of personality or culture, which is reflected in rhythm, stress, or vocalic sounds within the vocal art form.

Radio, television, and movies have stabilized linguistic change and have encouraged imitation of vocal diction and even vocal techniques for both teacher and student. For the curious, observant person, learning through such media has wrought wonders. However, social distinctions based on class, education, race, and wealth encourage the continuance of distinctive diction characteristics that are recognizably different from those of the cultured group.

Many teachers of formal singing rationalize their likes and dislikes on the basis of what they regard as the inherent beauty or ugliness of certain sounds and sound combinations. To such teachers, a sound is aesthetically attractive when it is employed in a word or combination that is inspiring to the intellect, comfortably produced, that is, free of vocal tensions, and pleasing to the ear—particularly if it is uttered by a class of people that is musically prominent, educated, traveled, and cultured.

Gray and Wise have discussed “beauty in American dialects” as follows:

We sometimes see or hear discussions purporting to compare the relative beauty of the major American dialects. Such discussions are futile and reveal their futility through inconsistency. Any statement, for example, that the [ӕ] sound in the Southern and General American pronunciation of grass is unbeautiful falls down immediately before the fact that even in those dialects where grass is pronounced [gras], the [ӕ] sound nonetheless occurs in lass [lӕs], package [pӕkedჳ], sadly (sӕdlI], attitude [ӕtitud], and many other words, without arousing any criticism of its alleged unmusical quality. It is safe to say that any comparison of the various dialects intended to disparage one or more of them can be shown to be similarly inconsistent. It is reasonably certain, too, that such criticisms are usually made in an attempt to rationalize or justify adherence to a so-called “standard English,” without real knowledge of any way, if indeed there is any, to compare the relative aesthetic values of dialects. Without venturing formally into the realm of aesthetics, the present authors are willing to risk the statement that beauty of utterance consists not so much in the selection of values to be assigned to vowels and consonants as in the manner of uttering these sound values (modifications). Of course our ideas of acceptability are conditioned, and rightly so, by the customary practice of educated people. For this reason, [sӕs], however musically pronounced, could never be accepted as a well-sounding pronunciation of sauce so long as educated people pronounce it [SɔS]. But we reject [sӕs] not because of any inherent lack of currency among educated people. It is safe to say that if all prejudice can be eliminated from an individual’s judgement he will admit that any of our major dialects, when well spoken, is beautiful.³

THE DIALECT AREAS OF THE UNITED STATES

Style and dialect differ. “Styles are. the emergence of set diction habits from speech forms of ancestor, parent, or community. They are constantly changing; a dialect is a survival of a successful style.”⁴

Early in the history of America, communities were remote and isolated, and they developed various language patterns. The development of the railroad facilitated the mixing of speech cultures and brought to these communities a more standardized form of speech modeled after that of the British stage. Local and provincial dialects became widened and fused. As a result, today some seventeen distinct dialects exist in the United States.⁵ Three of them, each including a number of subsidiary dialects, are major:

1. The Eastern dialect is spoken by about 19 million people in an area embracing New England, New York City, upstate New York, and northern Pennsylvania to the Ohio border.

2. The Southern dialect is spoken by 49 million people in an area including southern Delaware, southeastern Maryland, and southward through all the southeastern and southern coastal states, but embracing only a part of southeastern Texas. Exceptions within this area are the southern Appalachian highlands, the highlands of Arkansas and Louisiana, and the remainder of Texas.

3. The General American dialect is spoken by 112 million people throughout the rest of the nation.⁶

The rapid growth of the communication media has made the borders of these major speech areas less distinct and has given phoneticians cause to state: “There is in the making a common speech for America, not the ‘standard speech’ of phoneticians superimposed upon the people, but a standard speech arising spontaneously from the people.”⁷

They are referring to the General American dialect, which is rapidly becoming the accepted standard of diction in both speech and song.

A DIALECT FOR SINGING

Vocal coaches and conductors tend to prefer the soft sounds of the Eastern dialect or the cultured phonemic substitutions inherent in British Stage speech. Such a preference is justified partly because the dialect has been stable for years, partly because it reeks with culture, and partly because phonemic refinement is needed when dealing with an art form in which cultured speech is the antithesis of colloquialism.

Phonemic variation among dialects is obvious when the spelling of the word is considered. Because of this variation, one must compare General American, British Stage dialect, and the Singers dialect, which is a suggested phonemic modification of General American and British Stage dialects for proper utterance in song.

The author’s intention is not to become a reformer of pronunciation or to decide what phonemic utterance is “good” or “bad” within the singing experience. The decision to include the Singers dialect is based on a word recognition condition that can be observed in the singer-audience relationship: When excellent diction is part of a singer’s established technique, the listener recognizes instantaneously the word that is directly related to its familiar pronunciation within speech forms. Therefore, it is the singer’s duty, throughout all migration in pitch changes, to preserve the integrity of the authentic phoneme and not to select a migration that will cause the phoneme to migrate in a direction that is unnatural and will not enhance the vocalic sound.

If the Singers dialect has an identifying element, it is the tendency to approximate and modify the authentic General American sound toward an immediately adjacent phoneme at secondary accent points, rather than to depart from it as is often clone in the British Stage dialect. For example:

The Singers dialect demands both stress and phonemic substitution that is wholly compatible with good singing techniques and intelligibility. The prosody of the text within the melodic line and the duration of each phoneme within a variable pitch range demand an attention to migration problems that are easily solved by the alert student who has refined his vocalic utterances phonemically. The speech forms of the less dedicated will degenerate into colloquialism.

Within any society, the vowel is more unstable than the consonant. Styles in the production of the consonant change much more slowly, and trends are more difficult to discern. Therefore, the real emphasis here will be placed on the utterance of the vowel.^*

DRILLS TO EMPHASIZE DIALECTAL VARIATION

These words may be used as ear-training drills which will enable the student to identify the phonemic differences between dialects. Each word should be first spoken then sung.

Unstressed Suffixes^**

Unstressed Endings

Unstressed Medial Syllables

Spelled with the Letter A

The Sound of [ɔ]

[ə] Instead of [r] after [I, ε, U, ai, au]

The Sound of [r] as a Final Phoneme

The [t] as an Aspirate

The [j] Sound Following Phonemes [d], [n], [I], [s], [t], [h]

The Stressed Sound of [ɜ]

The [ʍ] Sounds

The Sound of [ou]

In [ou] sounds where the tense [o] would norma11y be used in General American dialect, e.g., [o] in [bot] the present day practice within cultured British stage dialect is to substitute [ɜU] or [ɔ] for [o]. Only [oU] is found in Jones, but [ɜU] is likely to be used much more often than [oU] in Southern British and on the British stage, for example, boast [bɜUst], grow [grɜu], oh [ɜU].

The [r] as a Medial Phoneme

(The flipped [ɾ] is used in intervocalic position or before another word beginning with a vowel.)

[aIl] as a Suffix

The Sound of [or]

Miscellaneous Pronunciation

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^* Authentic source for the General American dialect is John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott, A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English (Springfield, Mass.: G.. C. Merriam Co., 1953). For the Southern British Stage Dialect, it is Daniel Jones, An English Pronouncing Dictionary (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926).* The Singers dialect was devised by the author. For a complete analysis of dialect differences in the United States, consult the bibliography on p. 409.

^** A dot following a phonetic symbol indicates a slight migration toward the central schwa.

^*** Daniel Jones alters the I.P.A. by using the following diacritical markings 1: = [i], i = [I], e = [ε],ɔ = [ɒ],ɔ: = [o], u: = [u], u = [U], ə: = [ɜ].