Figura 1: Vowel modification.

The modification of consonants in Brazilian Portuguese is perhaps the most immediate noticeable characteristic of the spoken language. While European Portuguese assigns only one phonetic value for the “l”, in Brazil that letter can also become a semi-vowel /w/, whenever it is found in the final position or followed by another consonant. Thus, the correct pronunciation of the country’s name is [bazi:w]. In the third line of Melodia Sentimental the word fulge follows the same rule, rendering the ‘l’ as /w/: [fu:w.]. Another peculiar consonant modification is the addition of an alveolar-palatal fricative element to d and t, whenever these consonants precede a /i/ or //. The singer must also note that often the // is written as

e. The word noite must be sung then with /t/, instead of /t/: [no:j.t].

Figura 2: Consonant modification.

Also in the first phrase of this song the singer faces the challenges of Brazilian nasal vowels. Unlike the French nasal sounds, Brazilian Portuguese nasalization involves the addition of a nasalized semivowel to the basic vowel, creating an off-glide diphthong at the end of the phonation. Thus, the word vem requires the nasalization of ‘e’ and the addition of an unstressed nasalized closed frontal semivocoid, rendering the phonetic transcription as [ve: j].⁸ This particular aspect of nasalization does not apply, however, if the nasalized vowel is followed by a /t/, /d/, /p/, or /s/ as in the word ardendo. In this case, the nasalized vowel is prolonged because it is the stressed syllable, but there is no off-glide addition: [ae.]. Though some regional dialects add the off-glide sound in all circumstances, in lyric diction that addition should be reserved for cases where the nasalized vowel is followed by consonants other than /t/, /d/, /p/, or /s/⁹. This rule also applies when the nasalized vowel is an initial or medial ‘a’ as in the word branca: [ba.k]. The same applies to the nasalized ‘a’ in derramando and in chama.¹⁰

Figura 3: Nasalization.

It is also important to notice that, once again, unlike the nasalization of French vowels, the placement in the mouth of Portuguese vowels when nasalized is exactly where they would be when not nasalized.¹¹ In French the pronunciation of nasals involves a shift in mouth position, either by making a smaller and more acute focus with the lips in /õ/, by focusing and lengthening the tone by using the lips and dropping the jaw in /a

/ and //, or by broadening the sound by making a wider space inside the mouth in //. In Brazilian Portuguese the nasalized vowel retains the original position: the only difference is the lowering of the soft palate, causing phonation to enter the nasal cavity. Thus, in a word such as minha [mi.], the first vowel, receiving the nasalization by proximity with the consonant n must sound as a pure nasalized [i], an occurrence not found in French.

Portuguese French

vim [vi] vin [v] vinte [vi.t] vingt [vt] minha [mi.]

Figura 4: Portuguese nasals vs. French nasals.

It is a known linguistic phenomenon that any speaker will carry to a second language the phonetic behaviors of their native tongue, often without any auditory consciousness of the approximations and deformations inflicted on the target language. Any brave American singer who ventures into the Villa Lobos song repertoire should be made aware of some common traps for the American English speaker when singing in Brazi- lian Portuguese. These challenges can be grouped into two main categories: the first being mistakes relating to approximations of phonemes be-tween the two languages and the second being mistakes born of misreading the orthography of a song’s text.

The North American singer almost never associates the letter i with the phoneme //. Therefore the most common mistake is the substitution of /ɪ/, which is prevalent in English, for the Portuguese /i/. In Canção do Amor, singers must be careful to retain a pure /i/ vowel in the words ti, vencida, triste, solidão, realidade, vivo, virás, sinal, and all the other words which feature an /i/ whether stressed or not. Perhaps because the English speaker rarely encounters the sound /i/ written in English with the letter i, the natural tendency is to pronounce it as the much lower // sound, as in [ts.t], while the proper pronunciation is [ts.t]. (This is also a common tendency for English speakers when pronouncing Italian.) Another mistake of phonetic approximation is the common addition of off-glides to pure vowels, creating diphthongs out of single sounds. The English speaker often pronounces the letter o as a diphthong [ow] and the letter a as the diphthong [ej]. In Portuguese those diphthongs are always spelled with two vowels, as in beijos [be:j.s] and louca [lo:w.k]. The American singer must carefully refrain from creating such diphthongs when faced with only pure vowels, as in soluçar [so.lusa] and agrava [aga.v]. This is another case where comparison to the Italian language is appropriate, because in both Italian and Portuguese diphthongs are never represented with only a single vowel.

Figura 5: Approximation mistakes - Vowels.

Most English words ending in a single s preceded by a vowel or a voiced consonant realize that sound as /z/, the exception being the common words yes and this, or a few other words which come from Latin or Greek, such as genus, atlas, and focus. Because there is no absolute rule for this aspect of spoken English, North American singers will often choose the most common practice they experience and pronounce a final s as a voiced /z/. This is never the case in Portuguese, because the final s is never voiced unless it is followed by a word starting with a vowel. In that case, like in French (in which the final s of a word is usually silent); when the final s elides with the next vowel it becomes a voiced fricative /z/. The singer of Canção do Amor must therefore be careful to keep the voiceless fricatives in beijos [be:j.s] and teus [te:ws], while voicing the s in virás enfim [via.ze:jfi].

Figura 6: Approximation mistakes - Consonants.

The double consonants found in Portuguese can be another source of confusion for the North American singer. Perhaps the most misleading is the cluster ch, because it is a common occurrence in English and in Italian. However, in Portuguese these letters are never pronounced as the English /t/ or the Italian /k/; the correct sound is always a simple//, as in chama [a.m]. Note that in Spanish this cluster is also pronounced as in English^xii, reinforcing the earlier argument that the singer must refrain from applying Spanish diction rules to Portuguese.

The clusters nh and lh present a different challenge. Though there are no equivalents in English for these sounds, there are a few approximations which can cause the singer to fail in producing an authentic pronunciation. In the case of nh, as in the word minha [mi.], it should be pronounced always as //, with no epenthesis (the insertion of an unwritten sound) between this consonant and the following vowel. In this situation the American singer might be tempted to introduce the epenthetical glide /j/ as in the English word onion [n.jn]. One word of caution about this specific sound is that it is similar but not equal to the Spanish ñ. While the Spanish phoneme is alveolar (produced with the tip of the tongue touching the hard ridge located behind the upper front teeth), the Portuguese nh is palatal (with the middle of the tongue touching the hard palate). The awareness of this difference in tongue position will correct any undesired approximations.

In the same manner the lh in the word olhar [oa] in Melodia Sentimental must always sound as a clean //, once again avoiding the epenthetical vowel. The English speaker may try to approximate that phonation to the closest occurrence in their language, which would be in a word such as million [ml.jn], and that would be a mistake. The tongue must roll directly into the /a/ vowel, with no glide. The best example of that oc-currence in another situation is the Italian contraction between an article and a noun that begins with a vowel, as in gl’occhi [k.ki].

Figura 7: Double- Consonants with one sound.

One more spelling that may be misleading for an English speaker is the Portuguese use of nasal consonants to mark nasality of vowels, but with no consonantal value, as is also the case in French. There is no orthographic situation in English where a final nasal consonant has no phonation of its own, serving only as a marker of nasality for the preceding vowel. Thus, words such as ausente, com, mim, and tormento (Canção de Amor) are frequently deformed by the addition of a nasal consonant no- n-existent in Portuguese:

Ausente [a:wze.t] and not [a:wzen.t] Com [ko] and not [kom] Mim [mi] and not [mim] Tormento [torme.t] cand not [tormen.t]¹³

Figura 8: Consonants as nasality marks (only).

The development of accurate and fluent pronunciation of Brazi- lian Portuguese for the North American singer can be an undertaking filled with confusing and contradictory aspects that in some cases do, but in other cases do not relate specifically to pronunciation codes they have learned for other Romance languages such as Italian, Spanish, and French. However, as more Brazilian linguistic scholars emerge to undertake the task of codifying and describing these challenges, North American singers will find more and better resources to assist them. Their reward will be a greater and more profound insight into the vast output of vocal music by Brazilian composers, especially the marvelous works of Villa-Lobos.

Notas

¹ Vasco Mariz, A canção Brasileira- erudita, folclórica e popular (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Cultura. Serviço de Documentação, 1956), 265

² Dora Vasconcelllos, Quatro Canções da Floresta do Amazonas, ed. Roberto Duarte (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Música-Banco de Partituras de Música Brasileira, 2002), 11.

³ Free-poetic translation by the authors of this paper.

⁴ Dora Vasconcelllos, Quatro Canções da Floresta do Amazonas, ed. Roberto Duarte (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Música-Banco de Partituras de Música Brasileira, 2002), 16.

⁵ Free-poetic translation by the authors of this paper.

⁶ Maria Helena Mateus & Ernesto D’Andrade, The Phonology of Portuguese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Stela Maria Brandão, “The Brazilian Art Song: a Performance Guide Utilizing Selected Works by Heitor Villa-Lobos” (Doctoral Dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, NY, 1999); Marcos Krieger, “Portuguese Diction in Brazilian Vocal Music,” Journal of Singing 60, no. 5 (May/June 2004):479-485. Between the time when this article was written and its present publication, two other related sources appeared in English: Martha Herr, Adriana Kayama, Wladimir Mattos, “ Brazilian Portuguese: Norms for Lyric Diction,” Journal of Singing 65, no. 2 (November/December 2008):195-211, and Marília Álvares, “Diction and Pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese in Lyric Singing as Applied to Selected Songs of Francisco Mignone” (Doctoral Document, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, NE, 2008). The article by Herr, Kayama, and Mattos is a systematic description of Brazilian Portuguese sounds appropriate for singing, without targeting specific problems faced by the native English speaker. Moreover, the phonetic transcriptions are often arbitrary and inaccurate, exposing a bias towards the “Paulista” accent. The doctoral document by Álvares, which was co-advised by Dr. Krieger, addresses many of these problematic transcriptions, offering a more complete and accurate chart of the Brazilian Portuguese sounds to be used in lyric singing.

⁷ Krieger, 480.

⁸ This is perhaps one of the most difficult sound clusters of this language. Often the American singer makes the mistake of not nasalizing the off-glide, lifting the soft palate while transitioning between the two sounds (nasalized vowel+ off-glide). Already at the First Brazilian Congress of Theatre Portuguese diction in 1956 a clear directive was made to transcribe this cluster with a tilde over each sound or a tilde large enough to cover both sounds, stressing the fact of a continuous nasality in this situation. The singer should keep the soft palate lower, closing the nasal port, though the tongue moves to form the off-glide. Lília Nunes, Manual de voz e dicção (Rio de Janeiro: Serviço Nacional de Teatro, 1978): 158.

⁹ Krieger, 481

¹⁰ Krieger, 481

¹¹ Obviously, the lowering of the soft palate always alters the oral cavity, thus influencing the quality of the vowel. In Portuguese, however, this change is minimal: the position of both the tongue and lips must remain identical to the position for the oral vowel represented by the respective letter. See Thaïs Cristófaro Silva, Fonética e Fonologia do Português (São Paulo: Editora Contexto, 2001): 91.

¹² For example, the word chica, which is pronounced [i.ka].

¹³ However, the nasal consonant followed by a vowel will always have consonantal value, without influencing the oral aspect of the following vowel, as in the word canôa [kano.] and not [kano.]. The nasality by approximation to nasal consonants only works retrogressively,

i.e. to the vowel preceding the nasal consonant.

References:

ÁLVARES, Marília. Diction and Pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese in Lyric Singing as Applied to Selected Songs of Francisco Mignone - Doctoral Document. University of Nebraska – Lincoln, NE, 2008.

BRANDÃO, Stela Maria. The Brazilian Art Song: a Performance Guide Utilizing Selected Works by Heitor Villa-Lobos - Doctoral Dissertation. Teachers College, Columbia University, NY, 1999.

HERR, Martha; KAYAMA, Adriana; MATTOS, Wladimir. Brazilian Portuguese: Norms for Lyric Diction. Journal of Singing – NATS, Jacksonville, FL, v. 62, n. 2, p. 195-211, November/December 2008.

KRIEGER, Marcos. Portuguese Diction in Brazilian Vocal Music. Journal of Singing - NATS, Jacksonville, FL, v. 60, n. 5, p. 479-485, May/June 2004.

MATEUS, Maria Helena; D’ANDRADE, Ernesto. The Phonology of Portuguese Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

MARIZ, Vasco. A canção Brasileira - erudita, folclórica e popular. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Cultura. Serviço de Documentação, 1956.

NUNES, Lília. Manual de voz e dicção. Rio de Janeiro: Serviço Nacional de Teatro, 1978.

SILVA, Thaïs Cristófaro. Fonética e Fonologia do Português. São Paulo: Editora Contexto, 2001.

VILLA-LOBOS, Heitor. Quatro Canções da Floresta do Amazonas. Edited by Roberto Duarte. Rio De Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Música - Banco de Partituras de Música Brasileira, 2002.

Recebido em 22/09/2008 Aprovado em 20/12/2008

Dr. Marcos Krieger – Is on the faculty of Susquehanna University, where he teaches organ, harpsichord, and music history. A native of Brazil, he has done extensive research on the methodology and approach of Portuguese diction. His article on the subject was published in the May/June 2004 NATS Journal of Singing. That document was one of the first works in English Language addressing the subject.

Dr. Nina Tober – Former winner of the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, is an experienced performer of Italian, Spanish, and French classical repertoire. She is Associate Professor of Music and Music Department Head at Susquehanna University where she teaches voice, vocal pedagogy, and diction.