At 01:08 AM 04/08/2000 +0200, Alain Zürcher wrote:
><< The only consistent thing I have noticed about discussions of tone in
>17th and 18th century writings are the insistence on pure vowels. Now,
>the term "pure vowels" may be open to discussion,
>but certainly some vowels are acoustically more naturally resonant
>than others. And they happen to correspond to the usual five Italian
>vowels, which represent extremes and means of resonator positions....>>
>
>I am a bit tired of reading about "the 5 Italian vowels", since:
>1) even in Italian, the "o" and "e" can be open or closed, which makes at
>least 7 vowels,
>2) I cannot find any reason why a [y] (French "u" or German "ü") or a German
>closed or open "ö" (French "eu") should not be considered (and sung) as
>"pure".
>
>Depending on your native language, the concern with "pure vowels" is also
>very different. For an Englishman, it could mean "no diphthongs": each vowel
>should begin and end with the same sound. For an American, you would like to
>add "no nasality". For a Frenchman, the emphasis should be put on not
>letting the preceding and following consonants corrupt the vowel.
The meaning of "pure" as applied to vowels depends on the field
of discourse. In Linguistics (or more accurately, in phonology)
a pure vowel is any sound produced with an open airway and no
movement. So, not only do the French u and eu qualify, but so do
the nasal vowels and the final -e when sounded.
But I think the point about some vowels being more naturally
resonant than others is correct - try singing the sound of
German or French final -e (it's called a "schwa") - but sing it
long - don't let it drift to an ah or eh - and then sing an ah
as in "father" - you'll hear the difference resonance instantly.
(and if not, you're not singing the right ah) (But maybe this
has more to do with the degree of coverage involved - and not
with the lovely notion of nodes and end points - I'm very open to
feedback on this)
I think you are right about Italian having 7 vowels (at least).
The idea that there are exactly 5 almost certainly comes from
classical Latin, which (supposedly) had exactly 5 vowels, which
could (theoretically) be long or short without changing the
shape, plus diphthongs. (But if the shape changed a little, that
didn't affect the phonemic value of the vowel. That's the way
it works with speech sounds: They can move a bit, but not into
the territory of another sound. For this reason, the French
uvular r can afford to drift into the territory of the German
(a)ch, but the German uvular r cannot.
Lastly, the meaning you alluded to in the phrase "concern with
'pure vowels'" is a matter of "How beautiful can I make it?"
rather than a question of what the sound is, phonologically
speaking. The question of what is beautiful, of course, is
subjective, but when singing in one's native language, I surmise
that it usually boils down to how much one can bend one's native
speech habits in the direction of "the 5 pure vowels" and still
be understood and appropriate for the music. In American popular
singing, for instance, sounds like n, r and various diphthongs
are often treated almost like pure vowels, and huge issues of
style sometimes hinge on how long to delay the onset of the n,
r, or the second part of the diphthong. This may be the polar
opposite of Bel Canto, yet a singer who is going for beauty and
resonance moves these things as far as possible (in the Bel
Canto direction) but not to the point where it stops being
idiomatic. That point is a little different for different
popular styles; Musical Comedy is more Bel Canto than Jazz,
which in turn is more Bel Canto than Rock... and so on. So, I'll
go out on a limb and say that the principles of Bel Canto could
apply to most types of singing, in any language, at least to
some degree.
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