Diction for Singers: The Gift That Surprisingly Keeps On Giving
A Unique Class that Helps Singers Learn a Particular Set of Skills
Let’s start this out with a joke. And if this joke offends you, maybe take a little personal inventory. Or, really just learn to laugh at yourself.
What do you call someone who only speaks one language?
An American.
Ok, now that we have laughed a little, let’s talk about languages! I absolutely LOVE learning new languages. It’s something I wish that I had taken more seriously as a child, or when I was in high school. I got close to fluency in Spanish, but had I been more diligent or started earlier (like my mom tried to get me to do) I would have been fluent by now. It’s still something I am working towards.
But, there are also a couple of other languages that speak to me as well. For example, my favorite languages to sing in are German, Russian, Gaelic…all before English. In fact, if I did a deeper dive, English might not be in my top 5 languages to sing in at all. And I think I know the reason for that. It’s something that is unique to singers who have sung in different languages, and moreover, especially unique to those of us who went to college to do so.
Where I went to school, James Madison University, all vocal majors were required to take a class called Diction for Singers. It’s basically a class that teaches us the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and also how to basically read the most common languages that are sung in, especially in the classical music world. If memory serves me correctly, these were the languages that we were taught:
English
Latin
Spanish
German
Italian
French
As a result, I can read 5 out of 6 of those languages, and basically sound fluent. In fact, a friend of mine makes fun of me when I speak German to her because she says it sounds so “fancy” and I have to always remind her it’s because I learned German to sing operas. I’ve also read most of the first Harry Potter book in German to another friend. I knew maybe 5% of the words, but I could pronounce everything perfectly. It’s an odd skill, but incredibly useful when you are expected to learn pieces of music quickly and sing in those languages regularly.
Now, the best thing to do when singing a piece is to of course learn the translation. One of my favorite pieces, The Erlking by Franz Schubert, would not be as powerful to sing if I did not know the translation. It also has 4 distinct characters in it as well, so knowing who you are acting as is also important. Read and/or look up the translation your own peril. The piece is like a 19th century rock song, especially because of the hard piano accompaniment. But the story is a dark one.
Many words that you sing in other languages also become words you just know because they come up so frequently. This is especially true for Latin because of the endless number of sacred (religious) pieces that have been written over the years. I was a little taken aback when I was walking on the campus of Catholic University of America a few years back. I found that I could translate all of the Latin phrases that were scattered across campus, and I wasn’t even thinking about it. It was really cool, but also a little weird.
With the ease that we can at least start the path to learning new languages with apps like Babble, Rosetta Stone, and Duolingo, getting started to learn new languages is easier now more than ever. Right now I am renewing my Spanish, learning Korean from scratch, and it has been requested from a friend that I also start relearning German, and also taking up Arabic as well. Needless to say, I will have to pick and choose where to really focus here, but I would love to be fluent in as many languages as possible over the course of my lifetime.
There are so many great reasons to learn a different language as well. Chief among them, it’s one of the best ways to help keep your brain healthy and young. Learning a language is also a great way to learn about other cultures. And, from personal experience, I know that it goes a long way when traveling to at least attempt to learn a few words in the official language of the place you’re traveling to. I didn’t learn much Greek before traveling to Greece, maybe 250 words tops. But that was more than enough to get my street Gyros and often folks would basically say, “thanks for trying, but we speak English too”. I was never offended, and the interactions were always pleasant.
To be fair, I learned the Greek alphabet and those words before my Diction class, let alone before I knew I could sing. But when it comes to speaking other languages since then, diction has been immensely helpful. You may not think about it, but the experience of singing in probably over 80 languages over the course of my lifetime translates well when learning a new one, even if it is not the same alphabet. You get used to hearing and making different sounds, even if you’re learning a completely new alphabet.
So I hope the meme that I used as the title for this piece makes a little more sense now. It’s something that goes through my mind often when I am reading something in a different language, and I laugh at myself. But I also thought that it would be nice to share that the reason I can do this, and why that meme applies to me and so many singers around the world, is because of classes like Diction that I took my freshman year of college. French might not have stuck with me, but the love of learning and singing in other languages certainly lives on.
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LOL the joke. But it's a fact haha