English Diction is our topic this week, covering the texts to "The Roadside Fire" and the aria "Iris, hence away" from Händel's Semele with vocal coach Mark Lawson, contralto Rebecca Raffell and tenor Donald George. Our focus is on what to do with Rs, WH words, the crazy spelling in English and some differences between American Standard and British Received pronunciation. Some of the new phonetic symbols referred to on this episode are [ɝ] and [ɚ] (for those Rs in diphthongs and triphthongs) and [ɒ] (for the British open back rounded vowel).

The Roadside Fire is the 11th poem in Robert Louis Stevenson's Songs of Travel and Other Verses (although most of us know it as the 3rd song in Ralph Vaughan Williams' song cycle Songs of Travel). Most of Stevenson's novels, poems and essays are in the public domain and available as free downloads at Project Gutenberg. Here is a libretto for Händel's Semele, for Juno's Aria, scroll down to Accompagnato Nr. 31 "Awake Saturnia from thy lethargy" and Air Nr. 34 "Iris, hence away", skipping over Iris' Recitative in the middle.

iTunes University is a free way to "visit" university classes--they have topics ranging from all the classical to modern languages, history, Fine Arts, mathematics, humanities... pretty much anything that universities offer, there's a class on iTunes U for it. Just go to your iTunes Store and look across the top for the heading iTunes U. I also mention the term "Lingua franca" at the beginning of the podcast, and I learned that phrase from iTunes U!

Just as a reminder, I refer quite a bit to the two main books on English Diction, Madeleine Marshall's The Singer's Manual of English Diction which has been the standard for many years, and Kathryn LaBouff's Singing and Communicating in English, which covers the differences between American Standard, British Received and the Mid-Atlantic Dialect in great detail.

Feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com