Rehearsal notes · No. 03 · Text
Singing in a language you do not speak: vowels, stress and honesty
Our folder is mostly in languages the choir does not speak, which is normal for amateur singing and rarely discussed honestly. This is what we do about it, and what we have accepted we will never quite fix.
- Rehearsal
- 20 May 2025
- Written up
- 8 September 2025
- Reading
- 7 minutes
- Room
- Gràcia and Eixample, Catalonia
The words go wrong before the notes do
A choir singing an unfamiliar language does not usually mispronounce individual words; it mis-stresses whole phrases. Every singer reaches for the stress pattern of the language they think in, and a room where people think in Catalan, Spanish, English and two or three others produces a line with the emphasis distributed more or less at random. The notes can be perfectly in tune and the phrase will still sound like nothing anybody ever said aloud, which is a strange and slightly hollow thing to listen to.
The composer has usually decided the stress for you, and it is sitting in the rhythm if you look. Long notes and downbeats fall on the stressed syllables, and when they appear to fall in the wrong place it is normally the singer who is wrong rather than the composer. We now read the text aloud as text before anyone sings it, in rhythm but without pitch, until the phrase sounds like speech. Half the problems disappear at that stage and never come back.
Vowels are the actual instrument
Choral sound is made of vowels; consonants are punctuation. This is why a German motet sung with Spanish vowels sounds wrong even when every syllable is technically correct, and why the reverse is equally true. The vowels of the language you speak are the ones your mouth reaches for at speed, and under pressure everybody reverts. What helps is deciding the target shape for each recurring vowel early, writing it into the score in whatever notation the singer understands, and then checking it whenever the phrase is revisited.
Latin is the merciful one, because church Latin as generally sung has five clean vowels and few surprises, and because a Catalan or Spanish speaker starts most of the way there. German is where we work hardest: the rounded front vowels have no equivalent for most of the choir, the final consonants are unforgiving, and the difference between two similar words can be a single vowel length. We have spent whole rehearsals on four words and considered it time well spent.
Said in the room
- Speak the text in rhythm before anyone sings a note.
- Let the long notes tell you where the stress falls.
- Agree one shape per recurring vowel and mark it.
- German finals and Latin purity need separate attention.
The evening that was entirely consonants
In March we gave a whole rehearsal to consonants, which sounded like a punishment and turned out to be the most useful evening of the term. Twenty-two people whispering a text in rhythm with no pitch at all is an unnerving noise, but it exposes everything: the section arriving late on every entry, the three people singing a different word, the final consonants landing across half a second like scattered applause. None of that is audible when there are notes on top of it.
The rule we came away with is that a final consonant belongs to the following beat, not to the note it ends. Everybody places it together, on a gesture, and the sound stops cleanly instead of dissolving. Initial consonants have to be early, sounded fractionally before the beat so that the vowel arrives on time, which feels wrong to every singer for about a month and then becomes invisible. Both are small mechanical habits that make an amateur choir sound considerably more assured than it is.
Meaning, eventually
We insist that somebody produces a plain translation before a piece is performed, written out line by line rather than as a summary. Not for the audience, who will mostly have a programme, but for the singers, because it is very difficult to shape a phrase you do not understand and very easy to sing a lament with a cheerful lift on the last word. A line-by-line version also shows where the composer has repeated a word, which is usually the whole architecture of the piece.
Understanding the text does not make a choir sound authentic and we try not to pretend otherwise. Twenty people from a city that mostly speaks two other languages will always sing a German motet with a certain accent, and audiences here are neither fooled nor troubled. What changes with understanding is the phrasing: the breathing lands in sensible places, the loud bar is loud for a reason, and the piece stops being a beautiful sequence of syllables and starts being about something.