Bloggie goes a walking... to visit ChoralNet

I just discovered that my blog post of June 12, Why SIng? was picked up on ChoralNet. I was quite surprised, and also rather flattered that something I wrote "went choral" (next best thing to going viral).

I checked out the site, which seems a marvelous resource for choral singers of all kinds. There, I also discovered that Hal Leonard Music has purchased Shawnee Press. This pleases me. I am forever talking to students about pronouncing the words so that the listener can understand what the lyrics are about. Now, just maybe, it will be possible to get that helpful little Shawnee Press pamphlet, Tone Syllables, that outlines the techniques I first learned at my grandfather's knee - he was for many the lead baritone with Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians - and then had reinforced at Fred Waring's Youth Choral Workshop in 1966 (when I was extremely youthful!). I have never once sung onstage without using what I learned that summer, and I am completely mystified as to why every chorus and choir doesn't use this same concept. If a song has words, there is no reason whatsoever for the words to be unintelligible. I don't mean that lyrics in German should be understandable by non-German speaking listeners, but they certainly should be making sense to Germans! I am especially shocked to hear opera sung in English that is so mangled as to have to be supertitled. For cryin' out loud, folks! I realize there are technical difficulties in producing that incredible volume of sound, and several classical singers (and teachers of same) tell me that it is impossible to clearly enunciate. I might have believed them... had I never heard Rufus Muller.

I was privileged to get a ticket to his recent performance in Jonathan Miller's production of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Rufus sang the tenor role ot The Evangelist (the central role) with exquisite control of his voice; able to caress, grieve, whisper, thunder, and inflect with a razor's edge of irony when called for. It was thrilling and gorgeous singing - and I understood every word.

Which proves it can be done, and there, for the moment, I rest my case. Let's have a run on Shawnee Press's Tone Syllables, and change the singing world!