Text & Time In The Music

All right, all right - I've had it!

I know the answer, and I've been waiting for somebody to ask me the question - but I can't stand it any more. Sitting through HOURs - months! - of rehearsals; being yelled at by punk-baby conductors who "...can't understand why your diction isn't clear! ... can't understand what we're singing!... yadda, yadda, yadda!" This is Basic Brow-beating 101. And they just don't get it! Somebody print this up and put it on his piano!

Diction is a property of time.

It is not a matter of how you pronounce it but when.

In the rhythm of the text everything happens in precise sequential moments in time, together, all the same way. Just as unison vowel color results in a beautiful choral tone, so does rhythmically articulated consonants result in crystal clear text.

All the time people tell me - "I've never been very good with rhythm" And I tell them, I was never very good with rhythm, UNTIL I learned how to count-sing.

So the task - as a choral musician begins to learn the music is as follows:
1. Count-sing ( eewww ...we hate count-singing! we just wanna sing the music)
Why? - because count-singing gives the pitches a metric context in time.
Repeat after me: "count-singing gives the pitches a metric context in time."

It's about accents, and weight within the measure. It's about tapping your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time. It's about reading music without having to think of anything but the count. It's about finding and maintaining a consistent tempo in an ensemble. It's about multiple parts all singing the same words: "One-e-&-uh, Two-e-&-uh, Tee-e-&-uh." It's about articulating something together for clarity.

Robert Shaw said, "It's harder to sing in time than in tune." (p.2 of my autographed score of the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten)