Mind your languages

One thing that Cuddly Human tells me is very important about singing is that you need a good understanding of languages, and, failing that, a good translation to hand.  It's all very well having a general sense of what a song is about, but if you want to ensure that all the delicate nuances of emphasis fall in exactly the right places, then you have to know what every word means.  Not only that, but also, of course, you have to be able to get all the pronunciation right, although this is a different skill and Cuddly Human thinks it is a lot easier to learn.  You just have to go to YouTube as mentioned in my last post, find a recording of a native speaker singing the song you want, and carefully copy their pronunciation.

Now it follows that the better you are at expression, the better you have to be at understanding the language.  If you're where Cuddly Human is and your expression is for most practical purposes limited to dynamics, then all you need to know is the meaning of each phrase.  But if you are one of these intelligent and ultra-subtle baroque singers who can effectively use tone colour to pick out the emotions in individual words, it becomes a rather different matter.  Further complications arise due to the way language changes over time, and if you are a baroque or early music singer you are certain to run into them.  A word used by Monteverdi in one of his madrigals may or may not mean the same as it does in modern Italian, or it may not exist in modern Italian at all.

I'm not a language expert.  I speak Penguin and understand English.  Cuddly Human, however, does know something about languages, and especially about mediaeval and Renaissance Italian, and so without further ado I'm going to let her discuss translation with you.  She does go on a bit, though, so I'll jump up and down if I think she needs to be brought to a conclusion.

Thank you, Charles - nice little blog you have here!  What you didn't mention was that I am primarily a poetry translator, and song lyrics often have to be approached in a similar way, since they are usually poetic or semi-poetic in nature.

When I'm translating a poem, usually by Dante or Petrarch, I take great care to preserve or at least echo the rhyme and metre.  (Sometimes it is not possible to keep exactly the same metre, as there are metres which work well in one language but not the other.  However, I will always preserve as many features of the original as I can.)  When I am translating song lyrics I don't normally do this, because the point of the translation is not to produce a polished piece for someone to read or even to sing.  The only person who will see the translation is the singer I'm producing it for, and they will be using it strictly as a tool to help them work on the song in the original language.  Nonetheless, most of the other considerations I use when translating poetry also apply to songs.

The thing about translation - and this is what makes a task like converting an Italian sonnet into an English sonnet possible at all, though it is still of the order of difficulty of a good cryptic crossword puzzle - is that there is never just one possible way to do it correctly.  For any piece above a few words long, there are invariably very many possible accurate translations.  The task of the translator is not to choose the most accurate - there are too many candidates for that position - but the most appropriate to the circumstances.  Indeed it is very much like the task of the singer in interpreting a song, and ideally the singer and the translator should work closely together so that the two tasks mesh.

Let me take a concrete example in the shape of the first sonnet in Dante's Vita Nova.  For the benefit of those who have no Italian I will not quote it in the original, but here is as plain and unadorned a prose translation of the last six lines as I can manage: "Love [a personification] seemed cheerful to me, holding my heart in his hand, and in his arms he held my lady asleep, wrapped in a cloth.  Then he woke her, and of that burning heart she humbly fed, though she was afraid; then I saw him leave, weeping."

Now that is pretty weird stuff to the modern reader, not to say quite revolting.  But what we have to remember is that Dante's original audience would have read it very differently, being much more used to metaphors of this type, not to mention having a completely different culture with a set of basic background assumptions and shared referents which were in some cases quite wildly alien from ours.  This poem is a wonderfully stark example of the translator's dilemma which appears in a great deal of mediaeval writing.  Do you translate the poem in such a way that it comes across to a modern audience as similarly as possible to the way the original poem came across to the original audience, or do you translate it so that it comes across to a modern English speaker with the same breathtaking oddness that would be experienced by a modern Italian speaker reading the original?  There is no right or wrong answer to this, and I've translated poems at both extremes of this scale and various points along it, depending on my mood and the circumstances.  Nonetheless, resolving the dilemma is particularly important when you have the needs of a singer to consider.  If your singer wants to put his or her audience in the shoes of the composer's original audience as far as possible, you will need to select a translation that will jar as little as possible; whereas if the singer wants to show that this is something explicitly historical, and sees the audience as looking on from the present day, then if you find something odd or jarring in the text, you should avoid trying to soften it for modern sensibilities.  Often the singer will not consciously be aware which approach they want to use, and it will come out only through discussion.

I could indeed, as Charles says, go on at some length, but since he's now jumping up and down as he warned me he might, I had better draw to a close here and say that if anyone wants to discuss any further the matter of translating for singers, they are more than welcome to do so in the comments.

Me and YouTube

One thing I like to do very much is to sit on Cuddly Human's printer and listen while she is doing singing practice.  Cuddly Human says she's a mezzo, but that's something you could argue about, at least if you were feeling argumentative, which I very rarely do.  You could equally well say that she was an alto, given her range and the fact that she's very comfortable around the lower end of it (in fact she used to sing tenor, but I'm not quite sure if I'm allowed to say that, because her singing teacher has told her not to do it any more).  But she says her timbre is more mezzo than alto, and she does have a point there.

Now the thing about Cuddly Human is that, although she grew up in a fairly musical family and has always enjoyed music, she was never given the proper training when she was younger.  I'm not sure about the exact reasons; it just seems to have been one of those cases of humans being more complicated than penguins, even though they have smaller families.  She has sung in choirs and suchlike in the past, but it's only in the last two or three years that she has been taking singing lessons, and she will tell you herself that she's no good at sight-reading.  (Actually, she's not quite as bad at it as she thinks.  She can do it after a fashion, and she's often best if she doesn't think about it too hard.  But it's true that she gets stuck on almost anything involving a key change.)  She will also tell you that she doesn't play an instrument, although again that is something of an oversimplification.  She can play the recorder passably, and she can pick out a tune on a keyboard.  It's just that she doesn't have either of these instruments, or at least not one that is in full working order at the moment.

You begin to see why she might have a problem learning her music.  Fortunately, of course, there is always YouTube.  Cuddly Human thinks this is what YouTube is for, which is slightly odd if you think about it, considering how many other uses it has.  I mean, there are wonderful old BBC children's programmes.  And Weird Al.  And people playing the harp... but I digress.  First of all it was lots and lots of Cecilia Bartoli singing Italian art songs, which was fine, although even at that stage Cuddly Human liked to look around for other versions too.  She found some gems, including a surprisingly good amateur countertenor who recorded several songs in his garage, by the look of it.  Then she started branching out into some of the less terrifying Handel arias (she particularly enjoys singing He was despised, but she didn't need YouTube to teach her that).  Just recently it's been mostly Purcell, and that's where it has started to get interesting.

Cuddly Human loves YouTube.  She thinks it's the most wonderful invention.  You really wouldn't think it to listen to her when she's trying to find a suitable version of a Purcell song to learn from, though.  I must admit, I do feel a bit sorry for her, because she can't even eliminate all the male singers from her searches, just in case any of them is a countertenor she hasn't yet heard of.  It tends to go something like this:

*click* Soprano.  No. *click* Ah, countertenor.  Good.  Let's have a listen... ouch!  His vowels! *click* Alto.  Er, no, too operatic. *click* Tenor... ooh, shiny.  Lovely voice. *listen, followed by reluctant click* Not my range, though.  Who's this?  Andreas Scholl?  He's got to be all right... *listen* H'mm, well, yes, best so far, but don't you think he's much better singing Handel? *bookmark* *click* Soprano.  No, and also aaargh. *click* Bass?  Seriously? *click* Eeeep, teenager singing weird pop version, Do Not Want! *click* Mezzo or alto, nice enough, but the recording level is too faint. *click*

After a while, she decides she can't take any more of this and goes back to Andreas Scholl, even if she would really rather he sang Handel.  And then, a couple of weeks later, YouTube suspend the account of the person who posted the video and we're right back to square one.

Of course, she could always learn to sight-read properly.

A tale of two tenors

First of all, it's only polite to introduce myself.  My name is Charles Edward Fluffington Penguin, and I love music, which is why I'm wearing the headphones in the photograph.  I live with a cuddly human and three cats, and they all have very interesting personalities.  Cuddly Human also loves music, which is very fortunate, and she has a number of friends who are either professional or semi-professional musicians.  She herself is an amateur singer, but she says I'm not allowed to tell you what I think of her singing because I may be biased.  The best thing of all is that she goes to quite a lot of concerts, and very often she takes me along.  I hide in her bag so that the box office people don't have to worry about whether or not I need a ticket; she says they're not used to penguins.  A shame, but there you go.

As you can see, I'm a pretty cheerful little bird, but the one thing that does make me rather sad is the fact that I'm no good at making music myself.  In particular, penguins can't sing.  No, really, not a note.  It just comes out as this terrible squawk, so I don't bother trying any more.  Still, I can dream, and one day I asked Cuddly Human what it was like to be a professional singer.  Of course she isn't one herself, but I thought she might know enough of them to be able to tell me.

So she reminded me about two of her friends, both professional tenor soloists.  She says she would rather I didn't use their real names, so I'll call them Song Cycle and Masterchef.  Song Cycle is very cheerful and upbeat, just like me, and he really loves his work.  He does find all the travelling a little bit too much at times, but all the other things make up for that.  He enjoys most of the music he has to sing, he gets to work with a lot of interesting people, and he visits all sorts of interesting places, even if sometimes he doesn't quite get enough time to see them properly.

Now a little while ago, Song Cycle was out of the country singing with a prestigious European ensemble, and one morning at the beginning of the tour Masterchef started grumbling online.  First of all he grumbled about the fact that it was morning.  Then he grumbled about the transport problems he was having.  Then he grumbled about the weather.  Somewhere during the course of this tale of woe, he happened to mention his destination, and this made Cuddly Human very interested because she knew that was where Song Cycle was at the moment.  So she checked the ensemble's website, and there was Masterchef, listed as the second tenor soloist.  She told me that if she ever got to be good enough to sing as a soloist with that lot, she'd be squeeing all the way there, transport problems or not!

So I have to conclude that being a professional singer is what you make of it, and I can offer only one small nugget of advice to anyone who is considering such a career:

Don't be a penguin.