Understanding advanced linguistics might help your students sing better.
How much time do we spend correcting pronunciation in choir? It’s especially true in choral pieces in Latin or Romance languages, and if you delve into linguistics, there’s a way to understand it.
First, an easy one: diphthongs. It’s relatively easy for students to understand that diphthongs are much rarer (or nonexistent!) in Latin, so when they sing the word plena in a setting of Ave Maria, they can’t pronounce it play-na with the diphthong intact. My students seem to accept that pretty well.
The harder one, and the one I recently came to understand, is in short-vowel-sound-concluding words like ave. This comes down to a peculiarity of English. Because while we do have long-A vowels that don’t conclude in a diphthong, we do not end words with short vowels. It’s not available in English phonology. (A comparison is the difficulty some native Japanese speakers have differentiating r and l sounds in words, because they do not have both available separately in Japanese phonology.)
When a non-Hispanic English speaker says the name “José” they almost always make the final sound into a diphthong because the ending short a sound doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist in English. Their brain says, “does not compute.” And because our accent is so closely tied to our sense of identity (we start acquiring it before birth), adopting phonemes unavailable in our native accent is very difficult.
To me, understanding the way our brains process and then compensate subconsciously makes it easier to overcome it and sing words properly. I’ll be teaching this concept to my students in the coming weeks in hopes that they, too, can sing Latin with a proper accent, as they prepare to sing Latin in the Vatican!