• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Search for abstracts --- authors title abstract

---

Abstract ID: 551

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Neither British nor Trinidadian: Referee Design and Stylisation in choral singing in Trinidad

Authors: Wilson, Guyanne Alexis
Submitted by: Wilson, Guyanne Alexis (University of Münster, Germany)

Recently, there has been an upsurge in research published regarding language and performance, particularly with regard to musical performance. Earlier studies in this field, (cf. Trudgill 1983, Simpson 1999), were limited largely to US and UK varieties of English, but more recent scholarship has extended to include other Inner Circle varieties (cf. Gibson 2011 on New Zealand English), and learner varieties (cf. Bell 2011 on German  Marlene Dietrich’s English pronunciation). Other important work on language and musical performance by Expanding Circle speakers includes Pennycook’s (2007) work on rap and hip-hop in locations as far apart as Japan and Gabon.  The focus of the research, therefore, has been restricted to contemporary popular music forms, and has tended to overlook the Outer Circle.  

This paper looks at musical performance in one (contentiously) Outer Circle variety, Trinidadian English. In addition to local and global contemporary musical forms, Western European Classical music, in the form of choral singing, is widely practised, especially among students at the country’s elite secondary schools.

The paper reports the findings from observations of school choir rehearsals in Trinidad in 2010, and of interviews conducted with choristers, conductors, and audiences. While local musical forms are performed almost exclusively in Trinidadian English Creole (TEC), choristers, choral conductors and audiences alike judge this variety undesirable for choral singing, preferring that an ill-defined “British” pronunciation be used, with the paradoxical proviso that the choirs ought not to “sound British.” The paper examines the data using Bell’s (1992) theory of Referee Design to attempt to account for the “misses”- those phonological features of British English that singers do not produce.  It then looks at very specific instances of stylisation in the data: moments when choristers appear to produce highly exaggerated stylised variants (here called Stylised British English) or are coached into producing phonological variants that belong to phonological inventories of neither RP nor TEC, but that are deemed highly desirable for singing all the same (here called Stylised Sung English). Finally, it considers that judgements of the young singers’ proficiency and eventual virtuosity is based on their ability to maintain the delicate balance between sounding like authentic choral singers,  and sounding like authentic choral singers in Trinidad.

References

Bell, Allan. 1992. Referee Design in the dialects of New Zealand Television Advertisements. Language and Communication 12. 327-340.

------------ 2011. Falling in love again and again: Marlene Dietrich and the iconization of non-native English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/5: 627-656.

Gibson, Andy. 2011. Flight of the Conchords: Recontextualizing the voices of popular culture. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/5. 603-626.

Pennycook, Alastair. 2007. Global English and Transcultural Flows. Oxford: Routledge.

Simpson, Paul. 1999. Language, culture and identity: With (another) look at accents in pop and singing. Multilingua 18-4. 343-367.

Trudgill, Peter. 1983. Acts of Conflicting Identity: The sociolinguistics of British pop-song pronunciation in Trudgill, P. (ed.) On Dialect. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 141-160.