IPA for Dummies

Many choral singers have managed to excel, or at least hold their own, without benefit of a formal music education. Sure, we may have taken piano or trumpet lessons as kids. We can read a musical staff and know the difference between a major and a minor third. We know our fortes from our pianissimos.

Where many of us run into real trouble, though, is singing in another language. If you've never learned to speak German or French or Italian or Hebrew, how in the world can you sing it? Many of us cope by writing vaguely phonetic things above the line to help us, but what we write rarely matches what our neighboring singer has written.

We all know that being able to match vowels and vocalize consonants uniformly is one of the keys to a beautiful, blended, in tune choral sound. And that's where the International Phonetic Alphabet can be a great help.

The International what, you say? The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of notating phonetics created by an international team of linguists, with the purpose of providing one set of symbols that can be used by everyone. Nearly every known spoken sound has been catalogued and the beauty of this system is the one-to-one sound/symbol correlation. So unlike English, where the written "i" can be several different sounds depending on the spelling, the IPA symbol can only be one sound. For example, the IPA symbol [i] should always be pronounced like the "ee" sound in the word "neat." Though each language has its own set of sounds, many of these sounds are shared across multiple languages.

Here are symbols for five common vowels spoken in American English:

• [ɪ] as in it or dish
• [i] as in she or green
• [eɪ] as in bait
• [ɛ] as in bet
• [æ] as in hand

Odd, But Helpful

Look a little like calculus? That's what some of the singers with the Oratorio Society of New York thought when their chorus decided to engage in an IPA crash course led by Daniel Molkentin, a professional singer who teaches English and German diction at Mannes College of Music in New York.

Having worked as an apprentice with the Berkshire Choral Festival, Molkentin was the mastermind behind BCF's IPA website—a tool originally designed to help festival singers learn the German IPA symbols and pronunciation for Bach's Matthäus Passion (St. Matthew Passion). With OSNY, Molkentin went a step further, giving 10-minute presentations on German sounds and symbols as part of the group's regular weekly rehearsals in preparation for their work of Mendelssohn's Paulus. [Learn how to use and navigate the BCF's IPA site by viewing this video.]

Winning over skeptical singers wasn't easy, Molkentin said. "When we started in November, I'd say about 50 percent of the chorus was interested," he said, "but by March about 75 percent were on board. It takes a lot of patience and repetition, but it's worth it."

Elisabeth Cunnick, a soprano with OSNY, started out a skeptic, but was eventually won over. "When I first listened to [Molkentin's] recitation of vowel sounds, and, more strangely, of consonants," she said, "I never thought it would be anything other than evocative, intriguing, but decidedly odd."

Then at a rehearsal, she found herself scribbling an epsilon [ɛ] to remember how to pronounce the German word Bett and an [e:] to pronounce den, and a [ɔ] to remind her of the "aw" sound in words like Gott and Opfer.

"I get it now," she said, "I may get it too well. I have an idea that I speak German, though never having studied it, I suspect this is not true."