Je ne sais quoi

From Eric Hale:

As I mentioned in my last post, singing in French poses some special challenges for most of us in the chorus . That’s what I’d like to talk about today.

Before going too far, I should mention that François, one of our tenors, is a native French speaker. I’ve see him twitch on many occasions as the rest of us butcher his language. To him, I can only say that I’m really sorry.

When I was talking to Anna Bess, my wife, she asked if French was really that much more difficult than Italian. The short answer is “Yes.” As a concrete measure consider this: Coloni’s book Singer’s Italian is 149 pages, not counting the appendices. Grubb’s book Singing in French” is 221 pages, doesn’t have an appendix, and the pages are much larger.

I know there are people for whom French comes naturally. I’m just not one of them. There are three things I trip over. Oddly, two of them are things that I had to wrestle with as I was learning to speak standard English.

You see, I was raised with an accent that sounded like Jeff Foxworthy just smoked three packs of cigarettes after a four day bender. The kind of accent where “pen” and “pin” were pronounced the same, “I’m going to” sounded like “mona” and my name was errihKAYuhl. Anna Bess’ family is so Southern that her father took grits to Japan and even she can’t understand my relatives some of the time.

The first problem, of course, is the way words are spelled. However, I have no right to complain about this. As an English speaker, we commit far worse spelling sins - especially in 21st century America, where making up alternate spellings is a national passtime.

The second problem is that French uses sounds that just don’t exist in English. This is different than Italian, where the sounds exist in English and the challenge is to purify something you already know.

For example, the first phrase the chorus sings starts “Sur la place…” To my ear, that sounds like seer lah plah-suh – but it’s not. When François says it, I can hear that it’s not, though I can’t tell you why. Kevin coaches us on mechanics, things like “Shape your tongue like you’re saying ‘E’ and pucker your lips.” Those things help. However, after 4 weeks, I’m just getting to where I can really hear some of the differences.

These things seem subtle, but they are really not. That’s why listening to us is so hard for François. It’s like when English speakers hear Japanese struggling with Ls and Rs. To us, those sounds are very far apart. However, it’s really only a tiny difference in the position of the tongue that makes the difference between “lot” and “rot” or “lime” and “rhyme”. Confuse them too many times and you become incomprehensible.

The third problem is that the pronunciation of words change depending on the words to which they are adjacent. We also do this some in English: “the angel” becomes “thee angel”, while “the man” becomes “thuh man”. So, I have no right to complain. However, I do not have to learn English in 7 weeks. Fortunately, the rules in French are somewhat more orderly than in English, so there’s a chance.

As I said before, there’s much work to do.