Episode 67

We're sticking with Händel's Messiah this week, with soprano Amanda Majeski discussing "Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter of Zion" and the four short soprano recitatives before the chorus "Glory to God", followed by the rest of my conversation with Jan and Catherine McDaniel of the Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University. This week's episode focuses on English diphthongs and triphthongs, implosion and explosion of final Ds and Ts before another T and the specific words "righteous" and "with" (which can be the voiced delta [δ] or the unvoiced theta [θ]). The libretto for the Messiah can be found here (the recitatives are Nos. 14a, 14b, 15 and 16, "Rejoice Greatly" is No. 18) and the score is available as a free download from the Petrucci Music Library. We talk quite a bit about Madeleine Marshall's book The Singer's Manual of English Diction, which is still one of the most important reference materials for English Diction. If you want a brush-up on the vowel shifts between American Standard and British Received Pronunciation, check out Jason Nedecky's worksheet and for more discussion of the diphthongs in English, check out Episode 17. I left one completely mispronounced word in there, just for fun, and Miss Kitty Fantastico makes a quick cameo at the beginning that I couldn't help leaving in :-) If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact me here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at [email protected] NB: I found some new information that I needed to add into this episode, so I redid the episode, in case people are wondering why it's suddenly slightly longer. The word SHONE in British RP should be [ʃɒn] rather than the diphthong [ʃoʊn] that it would be in American Standard. The word SHOWN remains a diphthong in both British RP and American Standard.