David Crystal's blog

[Т А Кузнецова]

David Crystal’s blog

This is another interesting blog. The name of David Crystal is known to everybody and if you’d like to learn more you can go to http://david-crystal.blogspot.com

This is a post from his blog:

Sunday, 18 April 2010

On speaking music

A correspondent writes to ask if singing is ever used in speech. She isn't thinking of intonation, sometimes described in a metaphorical way as the musical property of speech - ‘metaphorical’, of course, because our voices don't need to be tuned to concert pitch before we begin a conversation. She has in mind something rather less obvious - musical quotations or catch-phrases, where a musical extract is given a generalized linguistic interpretation.

 

Yes, there are instances. I've heard people sometimes say Hallejuah! when a satisfactory outcome has been achieved, but instead of saying it they sing it as the opening bars of the chorus from Handel's Messiah. I can't think of many like that. Rather more common is the vocal rendition of orchestral fragments. A contemporary example is the theme from Jaws. The jocular expression of an approaching dangerous social situation is often conveyed by people sounding out its ominous low-pitched glissando quavers. It forms part of a dialogue that is otherwise speech, and it's meant to be judged by the same standards. Nobody thinks of it as an attempt to artistically render the original musical score.

[Алексей Конобеев]

David Crystal’s blog

This is another interesting blog. The name of David Crystal is known to everybody and if you’d like to learn more you can go to http://david-crystal.blogspot.com

Thank you so much for providing a link to this blog! David Crystal is a wonderful linguist and his Encyclopedia of the English Language is a must for everyone who wants to know anything at all about English. His lectures are also a brilliant source of information and I'm proud to have been present at his workshop which was organised by the British Council in Moscow several years ago, and to have discussed some aspects of my PhD thesis with him then. I'm going to bookmark his blog immediately :-)