soprano.wetpaint.com home 6/11/2006

Basses and Sopranos Should Avoid this Virus: Bell's Palsy (continued)

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Why I Appreciate Consonants

Consonants are very important to our listeners’ understanding. In experiments, scientists have taken recorded speeches and edited out all the vowel sounds. They have found that the meaning still comes across. Take out all the consonants, though, and what you get is bel canto, lovely, perhaps, but unintelligible.

And I had lost some of my favorite consonants! Take the name of the disease: Bell’s Palsy. How many times a day did I have to contort my lips into the dreaded “B” and “P” just to explain that, no, I hadn’t had a stroke. This is a disease in dire need of a new name, one that goes easy on the “B”s and “P”s. “Novocaine mouth” will do—anything that doesn’t force a sick person to trip over her plosives ten or twenty times a day.

Altos and tenors can still pronounce their parts, but sopranos and basses had better try to avoid this disease, whatever it be called.

That’s the thing that hurt about this disease, the thing I couldn’t even say, the blow to my pride, when I couldn’t form the words that used to spill off my lips.

Taking Stock of Consonant Production Capacity

My mouth is a factory producing words, hot air (and occasionally pollution, but we won’t go there). Many of the main production areas were operating fine, but the labial production areas were on strike.

I took a consonant inventory. My sibilants were still there. Those are the hissing sounds “s” and “sh.”

Fortunately, the palsy affected the lips, not the tongue or hard palate. The consonants we produce by putting the tongue to the teeth or hard palate were no problem—er—sweat. I could say “d,” “j,” “l,” and “n.”

I only had a half stock of those other labial consonants, “m,” “v” and “w.” If I formed them slowly and only used a few of them so my mouth didn’t tire, I could pronounce them. I told the inventory control department to ransack the thesaurus, substituting sibilants and gutturals whenever possible for my depleted labials.

The problem with a factory is, it’s hard to shut down. You can’t turn off a blast furnace over the weekend, or everything in it solidifies and has to be chipped out.

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