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@Tom_Munsell I’m sure you’re on top of it, but the lyrics have the word ‘sheigh’ instead of ‘sleigh’ in a few places.

Also, some of the hyphenation is a bit odd: e.g. bo-btail and qui-ckly.

@benwiggy Thanks for “sheigh”, lol… too much typing.

As for the strange hyphenation, I sang in a Chorale for 5 years. We went over this went we ever started a new piece. The downbeat of an word or syllable is always the vowel. For example take "angels’, 'an-gel’s. If you sing ‘an’, and the ‘n’ is sung too soon, the ‘n’ closes the tongue and the sound from the choir collapses. The same thing happens with an ‘r’, but it’s worse. Now imaging 100 singers doing this, you have a big mess or mush. The ‘a’ has to maintain it’s full length. You do this by adding the ‘n’ to ‘ngels’. The ‘ls’ is actually added to the beginning of the next word. Say it’s ‘we’, you would have “a-nge-ls_we”. If it’s done correctly you would notice incredibly pure diction, if it’s not, then the result is a poor performance, but it might be difficult to say why. Say, “Angels we have heard on high” very slowly and draw out the vowels, you will hear it. I am just writing it that way, it’s weird to read but correct to sing.

How many times have you heard the word, “God” sung and it comes out “Gah” and you never get the final “d”. When I write the word “God” for choir I write an extra note for the “de”, the “d” needs a vowel to vocalize it. Listen to a Italian person speaking English, they will always add an extra vowel at the end of a word to vocalize the final unaspirated consonant.

At least that’s my take on it.

Tom

@DanMcL Will do. I will have to figure out how to do it first.

Tom

@Tom_Munsell If you look at any published piece of vocal music, the syllables are split according to word hyphenation, in order to convey the word itself. The consonants are never placed ‘where they sound’.
Plenty of choirs can sing final consonants on the end of note without further instruction!

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Agreed… I know this isn’t a music engraving forum, but that hyphenation is simply incorrect!

As a professional singer, I must say I totally agree with my fellow Doricians up there. Please use a correct hyphenation, it’s the best way for the reader to understand quickly what word is sung (and therefore the colours of the vowels). How to sing consonants in a word is part of the singer’s job, not the copist’s. If those choir singers don’t know, then it’s time for them to learn :wink:
Your book, following conventions, will be really appreciated anywhere in the world. Without conventions, it will look like full of mistakes for 99,5% of the readers. My 2 c.

Didn’t Robert Shaw or some other choral leader develop a phonetic system printed under the English lyrics of songs in his arrangements to help his chorus members pronounce words (more the vowels than the consonants) the same way?

My recollection is that, the few times I encountered such arrangements, I just read the English words and ignored the phonetic script. But even in these arrangements, the primary lyrics were in standard English.

@Tom_Munsell Easy, just re-use a Master Page Set in other projects, then zip it up and post here. TIA, that would be a great help.

I won’t pile on to the discussion about hyphenation (though I agree with the views expressed above that you should almost always use dictionary hyphenation for lyrics), but I just wanted to add that we are aware of the deficiencies that Dorico still has with regard to condensing of choral music, and we are planning to do some more work in this area. It’s in the top three remaining areas of work for condensing (which are to improve the handling of rests, to properly support players holding multiple instruments, and to improve condensing of vocal/choral music).

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@DanMcL Here is the ScoreMasterSet with the TableOfContents.
I can’t upload a *.DoricoLib file, I had to zip it.
ScoreMasterSet-TableOfContents.zip (3.6 KB)

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I’ll also just add that when you change correct hyphenation, it also results in wrong WORDS being sung, because if the singers aren’t looking ahead, they can’t intuit what the full word will be, so then they actually make more mistakes because the words themselves are harder to read so they make the wrong assumptions about what is coming next. Every choir ever needs reminding to stick tot he vowels and put consonants on the ends of notes /transitions to the next note. That’s just par for the course.

I see what you di dthere :smiley:

Ironically, it was just an iPhone typo, but it does go to show how jarring it can be to read something in an atypical way. Lol

I still recall singing the hymn “The Spacious Firmament On High” and always getting stumped even by the correct hyphenation of ethereal sky: just gloss over the puzzling “e” and get on with “the real sky.” :laughing:

This is what comes from early morning chapel. :yawning_face:

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It might have been the Dale Warland Choral Series of music that printed an “as sung” pronunciation (in italics) underneath lyrics (hyphenated properly, of course). It was well-intentioned, but mostly a distraction to singers. They are going to read the lyrics only, and sing them as trained [or not so trained] choral singers. It’s up to the director to shape the sound from there.

Very unusual to have the individual parts broken out this way. That said, I did read an article about a choir director doing this with an anglican choir schola (youth) and having very good results. I’m curious how much you do this and whether or not it hampers voices singing non-melody parts.