Suggestions for Contemporary Composers on Setting English to Music

As an American singer that sings primarily English-language repertoire, I've really gotten a lot of satisfaction out of being able to deliver quality music to people in my native language - to an audience that understands that language. I've participated in a lot of world premieres for someone my age, and I'm acquainted with a good number of contemporary composers - many of whom want to write for voice. This post is mostly dedicated to those people, offering insight into what you can do to enhance the ease, intelligibility, and linguistic faithfulness of your English settings.

I Can't Stress This Enough

The most common problem I see in contemporary English settings is the misuse of linguistic stress. Stress can be applied to a given musical sound in these ways (among others)

1. Increasing the duration of the sound
2. Increasing the volume of the sound
3. Making the sound happen at an extreme pitch level
4. Articulation
5. Changing tone quality
6. Placement on strong beats
7. Assigning one of the above characteristics (duration, volume, pitch, articulation, tone, beat placement) in a manner that is obviously different from what surrounds it

There you go. Short list. Essentially there's only one common way to apply stress to a sound in spoken English: duration. Think of that word, "duration". The middle syllable is slightly longer, which gives it its stress. Longer syllables give English its rhythm, making shorter syllables unstressed and less important by comparison. In order to set this word sensibly, you would use items from my "Stress List" above to add stress to long/stressed syllables, and avoid applying items from the list to the short/unstressed syllables. To put it simply, you don't want it to sound like "DUraTION" or "duraTION" or anything else weird. Here are some options for how to set this word:

In the first example, the unstressed syllable "du" is being accented by its placement on beat one, and the stressed syllable "ra" is being un-accented by its placement on a weak beat. This is awful text setting. The second example is better, as the stressed and unstressed syllables are better aligned with correspondingly weak and strong beats. The third example is best, as the written rhythm mirrors that of speech. The fourth example demonstrates an effort to write correct stress allocation, but when speaking this, you can hear that the center syllable sounds unnaturally long.

This is also apparent on a more macro level, as entire words can be stressed or unstressed in order to affect meaning. Consider these options:

Obviously the word "tide" is the most important. In the first example, all words are given equal duration, but the placement of "the" (one of the least important English words) on the downbeat is incorrect. The second example shows the massive effect that duration has on stress, as shortening "the" by just an 8th note unstresses it quite a lot, thereby transferring more stress to the important word. The third example is better yet, and shows a more complex rhythm that one might see in a contemporary composition. This one gives both a strong beat and a rhythmic accent to the important word. Again we have an idiot-proof version at the end, perhaps not the most "artistic" rhythm, but one that will be clear and hard to mess up.

The Harder it Is, The Harder it Is to Understand

What is the goal of competent text setting? Intelligibility. It doesn't do you any good to pick or write a brilliant text if no one can understand it. Consider the following:

Melodically and rhythmically active, however...

...this version is simpler in every way, while still showing proper linguistic stress.

In a more demanding register, EVERY syllable becomes stressed.

The 5/4 meter of the first example does nothing to aid text delivery and only adds complexity for complexity's sake. The second example isn't interesting, but is a very simple rhythmic setting that is faithful to the text's inherent rhythm. The third example accents everything by being in a difficult register, as according to my Stress List, pitch is a way of adding stress. 

NB: Just as with every other instrument, the four main types of singing voices each have ranges, registers, prime registers, sub-prime registers, and extreme registers. It is your responsibility to know them just as you you do wind instruments, etc.

Flying Planes Over the Orchestra

Bernoulli's Principle, the scientific theory explaining the mechanics of flight, says that "as speed increases, pressure decreases". In other words, heavy things move slowly and light things move quickly. This means that if you want something to be loud, it will be easier to do if set in a slow rhythm or tempo. If you want something to be fast, it will be easier to do at a lighter dynamic. Don't get mad at me if you want to set a coloratura passage over a brass ensemble and electronics and it's coming out too quietly... I didn't invent physics.

This would be a difficult passage to understand, because it would be difficult to simply hear. A high voice (soprano or tenor) wouldn't be able to project this to any great degree, and it would be especially awful if written "forte" or heavily orchestrated. It is placed in a sub-prime area of the voice (decreasing the amount of weight than can be added), it is set rhythmically fast (decreasing the time able to be spent on each tone), and is wordy with a different sound on every note (shortening the length of each vowel). All of these issues affect the text, as the lightness, shortness, and sub-prime range conspire to obscure the sound - therefore obscuring the text. Consider this instead:

Here we have a better register (for a high voice), important words and syllables are stressed, and vowels have more time to be heard. This passage would be much more easily sung forte or with thick accompaniment, even the melismatic passage. The melisma is delivered on one vowel - serving to add a bunch of fast notes without obscuring the text whatsoever. Even though the second measure will have to be sung lighter than the first measure, the length of the vowel will help it to be heard and understood even if it can't be sung heavily. Obviously not everything can always be set in the absolute best possible way, so let's see if we can't alter the the previous passage rather than abandoning it completely.

Perhaps we're dealing with a play, short story, or poetic submission from a friend, and we don't want to change the text. Here is an alternate version that preserves the pitch landscape, rhythmic attitude, and text, without sacrificing intelligibility. This is in a better range, and the rhythms are better matched to the stresses of the language without being totally perfect.

WWBD? (He Would Speak It)

"WWBD?" of course stands for "What Would Britten Do?" Regardless of one's personal opinion on Britten (mine is that I'd be fine singing no other music), much has been written praising and proving his aptitude for setting English. Britten had one big advantage that most of us don't enjoy, which is that he worked closely with both the performers and the poets/librettists involved. He would work on a W.H. Auden setting, with Auden speaking the composition rhythmically and giving feedback on whether it was understandable. Though you won't be talking through texts with Maya Angelou and Diana Damrau any time soon, you will probably learn a lot from simply speaking through your texts. Does it sound like English? Do your meters and rhythmic divisions clarify, or do they obscure? Do the stresses, pauses, and pitch contours sound somewhat natural? And if not, is that unnaturalness justified by the text or the dramatic action at the time? Will this text be audible?

That's all I've got. And thanks for setting English, it's my favorite language in which to sing.

Fach

Once I was at a party full of singer types, and a guy comes up to me and introduces himself by telling me the following: 1) His name, and 2) that he is a full lyric baritone. It really annoyed me, and it always does. I don’t understand the preoccupation with voice fach among opera singers, and I’m going to explain why I think it is a load of horseshit.

1) Famous, skilled singers don’t adhere to their supposed fach, and do just fine.

Philip Langridge is one of my favorite tenors, definitely my favorite in English rep. He has sung Messiah, Peter Grimes, Hansel und Gretel, and Loge from Das Rheingold – and they all sounded great. He had a long career without any period of vocal dysfunction, and did so for some forty years. These roles could be (and ARE) argued as suitable for four different fachs (leggiero, dramatic, character, and heldentenor in that order). Fach is useless in describing this singer, because he sings several of them well. I have a million examples of famous singers doing this… Gedda has a great recording of the Evangelist in the St. Matthew Passion, and a great recording of Tosca. Vickers has a great recording of Messiah, and a great recording of Pagliacci.

2) Fach leads to stupid characterizations.

I’ll go with what I know, so more about Langridge and tenors. I didn’t mention one of his best things – Tom Rakewell in The Rake’s Progress. Since this is contemporary music, rhythmically difficult and with some odd harmonies, it is immediately disassociated with bel canto singing and therefore any Italian singing and all of the fachs commonly associated with such. No one wants to hear a Puccini singer doing this role (or a heldentenor), so what you get is a plethora of leggiero tenors mincing about in that manner of “contemporary performance” that makes audiences “ooh” and “ahh” because it’s so pretty (Robert Craft, Ian Bostridge, Andrew Kennedy, and Anthony Rolfe Johnson have recorded it). If you are so lucky to see it live, I guarantee you will see a smooth-voiced tenor with an even lighter instrument than the ones mentioned, because it’s tradition now. Rake has officially been assigned to the leggiero fach, which means that we have to deal with voices that don’t have the heft to properly communicate the music.

3) Famous, skilled singers adhere to a fach – resulting in total disaster.

Say what you will about Pavarotti, his stock as an incredible singer plummeted after he stopped doing bel canto rep and did only verismo rep. There aren’t many recordings of Pav out there more exciting than his debut in La fille du regiment, blasting “Ah mes amis!” with ease. Many smart, old-school teachers believe this vitality was seldom recovered due to his refusal to move away from a strict Verdi/Puccini diet, doing Boheme and Otello and all these giant things, as the simple beauty of his L’elisir d’amore just faded away. Famous coloratura Natalie Dessay has some great early recordings of Blondchen in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, then for some reason became classified as a dramatic coloratura singing the likes of Queen of the Night from Magic Flute, Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor and various Strauss roles. When her decidedly non-dramatic voice finally gave out, she had surgery to fix it, and has since logged many tired-sounding coloratura performances that are done a half-step lower than written.

4) Though people think otherwise, fach doesn’t say anything about vocal quality or suitability.

Quick, what do tenors Roberto Alagna, Joseph Calleja, Jose Carreras, Nicolai Gedda, Jerry Hadley, Rolando Villazon, Fritz Wunderlich, Giuseppe di Stefano, Richard Tauber, Luciano Pavarotti and Tito Schipa have in common? Not a damn thing, you say? Well you’re wrong! Dead wrong! Don’t you know that they are all Lyric tenors? That means that they are all suited for the same repertoire. I mean, wouldn’t you love to hear Pav sing Faust? Villazon singing Alfredo from Traviata, or Villazon singing absolutely anything in any capacity at all whatsoever? Jose Carerras singing Tamino from Zauberflote or Wunderlich singing Alfredo (look it up, it’s surprisingly bad)? The point is, FACH has nothing do with how suited or unsuited these people are to sing these roles, and FACH does not unite these singers in any kind of meaningful way. They are each suited to different things because they have different strengths and weaknesses.

5) Repertoire should be assigned to young singers based on ability, not stupid words.

I had a really fun lesson singing “De miei bollenti spiriti” from Traviata, with a pretty good recording to prove it! But guess what, the recording of the following “O mio rimorso” isn't nearly as good, at least not yet. It’s higher, harder, and requires simultaneously more weight AND flexibility. Oh so there must be TWO FACHS contained in the same role! No, no there aren’t, you idiot. The next thing I sang was Handel’s Judas Maccabeus, for a lighter lyric sort of tenor. Nope, I sang that just fine too (again, I have recorded proof), and I sang it the same way – based on principles learned in my voice lessons and NOT on arbitrary fach bullshit. If I would have stuck to Alfredo’s fach, I never would have done Judas. There are many, many better examples of singers that do things from different fachs very well, because they are suited to the music. Or their personal tastes fuel them to perform it well. Or their language abilities limit their choices. Or whatever.

6) You can fake your fach.

There are famous tenors (and others that I personally know) that sing very loud, have bad high notes, and sing in a weighty and inflexible manner. This is because they want to be classified as heldentenors, customarily known as the biggest loudest singers, and they sing Wagner. Because of the vocal weight in the average heldentenor, they usually don’t have high c’s or the ability to hang out in a high register. You can see this in “accepted” heldentenors like Lauritz Melchior, Jon Vickers, James King, and Wolfgang Windgassen. However, any tenor can choose to sing loud all the time and stay away from the high stuff, thus earning classification as a heldentenor. Or the reverse: sing prettily and never access the whole of their weight and resonance, and say that they are leggieros. A soprano can sing really quietly and lightly and poof, she’s a soubrette. Some baritones hang out in the basement of their ranges until they get good teachers and discover their high end realizing that, lo and behold, they are dramatic tenors. Any voice part can sing fast music with lots of melismas, do it badly, and claim “coloratura” as a modifier to whatever they call themselves.

7) Young singers use fach as an excuse to ignore important things.

I cannot tell you how many sopranos and tenors I have encountered for whom the highest possible goal is not communication, not legato, not musicality, language skills, stage creativity, repertoire knowledge, basic music reading skills, good taste, or longevity. The highest possible goal is the achievement of that constant pursuit, that big red stamp of “SPINTO” on their vocal profile. They want their teachers and peers to tell them “you have the biggest voice I have ever heard, it is massive and easily drowns out the other singers and the orchestra, you could sing Puccini and Wagner better than anyone, and your voice is like a beautiful wild diamond Pegasus that is way too important to be singing Handel or anything small like that”. Just please forget about this fach crap and learn how to sing. We have lots of work to do, lots of repairs to make, and an art form to uphold. There are people singing on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera that don’t sing legato, cancel dates left and right because of their shitty technique, and have vocal surgery because they (and those doing the casting) are more concerned with a singer’s dress size than their technique.

I don’t care. It’s not a real thing, it’s a construct of voice teachers that serves ego and nothing else, and it is a completely arbitrary system of classification… and you do not get to decide what your fach is anyway, so fach it.

Choral Directors

Here are some suggestions for choral directors from a singer.


Pitch
Pointing up with your index finger will not help a singer adjust their technique in any meaningful way to compensate for poor pitch. All it tells them is that you think they are flat. It doesn't tell them which person (or even which section) is flat. Most importantly, it doesn't tell them which pitches, passages, or chords are out of tune. Nebulous comments about tuning don't help, either. "The pitch is a little... ehh" is not helpful, neither are references to the general pitch being "wonky", "a little under", or "fucking atrocious". We embrace specificity, and so do good conductors.

Helping
You cannot, through sheer arm movement, make us sing better. You cannot affect the tempo by snapping your fingers or knocking on something while we are running music. Singers have to be responsible for tempo, and you have to tell them that. One person cannot force dozens to have good rhythm by banging on something. If the tempo suffers, conduct clearly, and enforce individual responsibility.

Teaching Voice
Most singers have voice teachers, and most voice teachers train their students to sing as soloists and with constant vibrato. Unless you have studied voice seriously with a technical teacher for several years, and read the major voice science and voice pedagogy texts, you probably don't understand vocal technique. As with conducting, there are traditional teaching methods, accepted texts and schools of thought, and scientific principles at play here, and you should consult some of these before giving vocal instruction.

"Raise the palate, drop the jaw" is not helpful, neither is it always a fix. You don't want your singers looking like the victims of the cursed videotape from The Ring, and a too-open jaw is not relaxed, it's just tense in the opposite direction.

Still Teaching Voice (Don't)
Do not make comments about our tone quality, that is personal and subjective. If there is a serious problem with it, it is not something that can be fixed in rehearsal, and will take a lot of work in voice lessons to fix. If there are certain individuals that are causing the problem, talk to them, not the entire choir. I guarantee that the choir will gladly help you identify the troublesome individuals if you can't do that yourself. Also, don't let bad singers pass your audition and then lecture us about the sound of the choir.

Also, for the love of all that is good in the world, do not request "pure" tone, or "floating" high notes. That doesn't mean anything. You are essentially saying "Could you please produce a perfect sound? That's not what we have right now." Don't demonstrate what you want, unless you are positive that you can do it perfectly. If you try a vocal demonstration and it doesn't go well, the singers will probably spend the next few minutes of rehearsal silently judging you and wondering what business you have giving vocal advice when you can't sing well. This is a fair question, as they're not giving you conducting advice.

Teaching Language
Understand that if you are working with a college or professional group, it is very likely that of everyone in the room, you have by far the least experience in whatever language you're instructing. College voice majors have a full year of college-level German, Italian, and French. You don't, because it wasn't required for your degree. If you're going to use IPA, at least have the courtesy to put it out with (or IN) the score, and not waste everyone's time by going through it aloud. It is valuable to read books and rules on diction, but it is not as substantial as the aforementioned years of language instruction that these singers have probably had.

Reality
You cannot fix deficiencies in our performance by jamming in extra rehearsal time just before the concert. If anything, you are going to worsen it by pissing us off because we're tired and demoralized, and we'll enter the concert hall that way. No amount of extra rehearsals will compensate for an inefficient use of time in rehearsal, nor for the fact that many people in a community choir are untrained musicians. Rehearsals should not be the length of a full workday, either. If we wanted that, we would have picked a career that requires full workdays. There is a very relevant concept called "vocal fatigue".

Insanity
Don't let a train wreck go for a long time without stopping it. When you do stop it, don't run things over again without addressing specific issues. Also, vague compliments are just as harmful as vague criticism, because they don't teach us anything about what happened.

If rerunning any section of music, clearly establish the goal for that rerun - no one wants to repeat something for the sake of repetition. Don't try to figure out warm-ups as you go, come with warm-ups prepared or let me do it myself. Stretches do not affect the respiratory, resonatory, or phonatory systems and are useless for vocal readiness. And finally, if you're going to have us do group massage, allow me to go wherever I want in the room so that I get to choose who I massage, because I'm sick of having to do Redneck Phillip Seymour Hoffman over here in the bass section when Italian Natalie Portman is over there in the soprano section.

Talent

The concept of "talent" has annoyed me ever since I gained a measurable amount of musical skill. Every once in a while someone will comment on how talented I must be, and I never really understand what they mean by that. It's as if they're implying that skills are inherited, even though we all know this isn't the case. I don't even believe that physical characteristics play as large a part as most people think they do. Sure, if you're born to tall parents and wind up being 7 foot 3, you'll probably be talented at basketball, but that's not everything (and if you think it is everything, talk to this mofo).

Yeah, it could be that I'm talented. It could also have something to do with the fact that I've worked at music almost every day of the last (almost) 20 years. I've brought this up to several people, and someone pointed out to me that a lot of people simply lack the desire to work really hard at anything, and therefore would rather chalk up their "talents" (or lack thereof) to some kind of nebulous concept of fate/genetic inheritance. It seems that people are always willing to hand over their power over their own lives... that fame, money, skills, happiness, health, and innumerable other things are administered by some unknowable governing body - victims of fate and circumstance.

Some things are beyond our control. Scientific studies have shown that certain brains have certain neural pathways that are stronger than the same pathways in others, and obviously no one has much control over their early childhood (where much formative knowledge occurs). This might be the entire kernel of the concept of "talent". But ask yourself, are you really going to let your neural pathways tell you what you can and cannot do? I don't believe I've ever been talented at music. It's very, very difficult for me, and I've seriously contemplated giving it up many times. I continue to persevere in spite of my sorry brain which, despite my utmost desire, absolutely refused to make me a Mozart-level prodigy, will never give me the ability of perfect pitch, and continues to laugh at my efforts to understand Stravinsky.

Other scientific studies have shown that you can create new neural pathways for yourself with enough conditioning. Maybe that's what it takes. Either way, you're going to be in for a lot of work if you want to get good enough at something to appear talented at it. Despite my lack of talent, my brain is reacting to the work I have done to keep it in shape, and if I keep practicing, I might really have something here. I think I figured something out about Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin today, so that's not a bad start.