Singing in Polish: A Guide to Polish Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire
2016; Routledge; Volume: 73; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2769-4046
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Academic Research Studies
ResumoSchultz, Benjamin. Singing in Polish: A Guide to Polish Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Paper, xix, 314 pp., $55.00. ISBN 978-1-4422-3022-4 www.rowman.comIn 2001, Timothy Cheek authored the volume Singing in Czech: A Guide to Czech Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2001), a thorough and detailed guidance that has encouraged singers to explore Czech repertoire. The book also served as a model for Singing in Greek: A Guide to Greek Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire by Lydia Zervanos (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015; reviewed in Journal of Singing 72, no. 4 [March/April 2015): 518-519). The third volume in the Rowman & Littlefield's Guides to Lyric Diction Series is devoted to Polish vocal music. In it, Benjamin Schultz, who is on the music faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offers an introduction to Polish vocal music and guidance in pronunciation.Following the format of the other books in the series, Schultz begins with the sounds of the Polish language. He explains there are a large number of dialects, and it was not until the latter part of the 20th century that linguists adopted Educated Standard Polish (ESP) as the universally accepted pronunciation. Schultz used ESP for the transcriptions, but he also relied upon publications by Polish linguists, consultations with native singers and voice teachers, coaching with native Polish speakers, and listening to native singers. While ESP is recommended as the standard, vocal pieces that are linked to a particular region (such as the title role in the opera Halka by Stanislaw Moniuszko) can be performed in the local dialect.Schultz mollifies singers who may be fearful of singing in Polish with the reassurance that its consonants are similar to those in German and French, and there are no diphthongs or shadow vowels. With a few exceptions, all letters in a word are pronounced. The challenges for non-Polish speakers are consonant clusters and the palatalization of consonants (in which the tongue is raised toward the hard palate and forward at the same time the consonant is pronounced). Recordings of the sounds are demonstrated by singers who are native Polish speakers on a correlated website.The second part of the volume is devoted to Polish vocal repertoire. Schultz invited a colleague at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, violinist Tyrone Greive, to pen an introduction to Polish music. Greive does not limit the essay to works for the voice, but provides historical and cultural context for this music that he considers under-discovered. In subsequent chapters, Schultz offers brief biographic information for seven composers, as well as translations and transcriptions into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for seventy-one of their songs. Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849) and Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) are well known Polish composers, and Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941) is familiar as pianist, editor, and diplomat. The other composers are less known outside of their homeland. Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819-1872) wrote 360 songs and several operas that were performed in Warsaw, Prague, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. …
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