Better Get Rid Of Your Accent?

Andy Gibson, a New Zealand singer/songwriter/very thorough MPhil research student, has been casting an academical eye over the significant issue of accents in song. New Zealand singers, he reports, are more likely to sing with American accents than their own. This is, of course, not always the case. If you’re a Flight of the Conchords fan you’ll know that Kiwis are just as likely to sing with a French accent:

"Foux du fa fa
Foux du fa fa fa fa"

But Conchords aside, he has a point. Although, when it comes to British singers, you don’t need a sheepskin from Auckland to know it’s true. Just watch any episode of X-Factor Idols Have Talent. On these TV shows you’ll hear the all the glories of This Island Tongue from southern drawls to flat northern vowels. The contestants will speak with a myriad of Cornish, Brum, Scots, Welsh, Oirish and so on. Until, that is, they start to sing. When they open their larynxes all accents take a trip over the Atlantic. “I love you” becomes “Ah luurve yoo” and American English is the accepted standard.

Mr. Gibson takes a long hard look at this. (I admit I didn’t read it all. I stopped when I got to the scary graphs. But the introductary chapters are terrific). He makes some fascinating points:

1. “Singers draw on their memories of popular music when they sing. Their use of American pronunciation in singing is therefore the result of the fact that a majority of their memories of pop singing involve American-influenced phonetic forms” (abstract, x). In other words singers copy other singers. Since most pop songs and a lot of pop singers are American, everyone else ends up singing in American as well.

2. Singing in American English becomes the default position and, thus, singing in non-American English becomes a “wilful act of identity” (p.10, good sociologist phrase that). So when Lilly Allen sings in an English accent it’s a very deliberate choice. But is this wifully acting out her British identity or just willfully lashing out against mainstream pop? Is she being patriotic or merely different?

3. It’s not even as simple as American vs. The Rest. Often singers flit between accents depending on which allows for the best sonority. It also depends on the kind of singing and the kind of song. Reggae singers will always tend towards Jamaican accents even if they’re from East London. Singing that is closer to speech, such as rap and hippity-hop, will lend itself to regional accents easier than, say, opera.

So what does this mean for musicals and does it matter? I think it does. Musicals were born (Show Boat), grew up (Oklahoma) and went through their cynical adolescence stage (Company) on Broadway. Then, after a while, they eventually settled down and devoted themselves to the kids (The Lion King). The point is that musicals are essentially American and that’s the way we tend to hear them.

The British musical accent, such that it is, largely consists of Received Pronunciation (from G&S to Phantom of the Opera) and cock-er-ney (from Oliver! to the lower orders of Les Miz). Essentially it’s Julie Andrews or Anthony Newley and take your pick. There's the odd bit of Geordie in Billy Elliot but that's very much the exception. The accentual field is not a wide one.

Modern musical singers share the same problem as pop singers. The natural tendency is to sing in American English because that is, largely, what has been learned. Audiences have learned this too. It takes a deliberate effort to sing in some form of British English. But that effort can often feel forced or self-conscious as if the singer is trying too hard to be different. Attempting to be true to your own accent can, ironically, make a performance sound inauthentic to an audience.

This is a big problem for British musicals. A pop singer can get away with it. But a musical performer has a character to play and if that character is British, how can you sing the role with a natural, unselfconscious British accent? The answer, or at least the beginning if an answer, lies not with the singers but with the writers. In this I’m going one step further than Andy Gibson's MPhil (although the same point may have been made somewhere in the form of a graph, in which case, I missed it). Writers have to attempt to write songs in a British accent.

Now this is far easier said than done and I’m not sure how you’d begin. It would probably involve unlearning the American musical language even before attempting to create a new British one. But there’s no doubt it in my mind that it starts with the writers.

Take, as an example, this drole little couplet from West Side Story:

“I’ll get a terraced apartment
Better get rid of your accent”

The song is “America” during which a lively group of New York Hispanics debate the merits or otherwise of their adopted homeland. But look where the lyricist Stephen Sondheim (smart fellow, he) puts the rhyme: on the off-beat. Helped along by Leonard Bernstein’s swooping off-beat emphases in the tune the words come out as apart-ment and ac-cent (rather than the “usual” a-part-ment and ac-cent). Why? Because the Hispanic accent puts the empha-sis on the “wrong” sylla-ble. Just try singing “America” in American English or British English or anything other than Hispanic. You can’t because the accent is written into the song.

If there are going to be British musicals then its the British songwriters, as much as their singers, who need to find their voice.