Sing In Different Fonts

 I once heard someone say, “tone is carried on vowels; emotion is expressed through consonants.” I like that as a broad generalization. I often ask my choirs to enhance their emotional impact through tone painting, and this is one concept I impart to help them.

 In order to get more specific about particularly important words, I point out the onomatopoeic nature of language. An onomatopoeia is a word that mimics a sound it references. Some examples are: boom, murmur, buzz, hiss, bang.

 I believe that even more words sound like what they are. Take a moment to say the following words out loud to see if you agree with me.

WARM

HOT

FRIGID

FREEZING

BLOCK

SOGGY

SPIKY

CRUNCHY

CUMBERSOME

BUBBLY

SOOTHING

SQUARE

ROUND

MELLOW

HARSH

 And so it happened recently that I was working with my chamber choir on the Rene Clausen “Set Me As a Seal.” As I was asking the singers to consider what were the most important words to stress, we were working the phrase, “...for love is strong as death.” I asked them to linger on the liquid/singable consonants in “love” to make the word more loving, to exploit the sharp consonants and open vowel of “strong” to make the word stronger, and to make the tone more airy/hollow on the word “death” to help complete the phrase with a taper.

Choir Bites Interactive Slides can enhance online/hybrid lesson plans or be used as supplemental assignments. Your singers’ awareness will rise as they engage with these simple, “sticky” concepts! Click here to learn more!

 As we were practicing, one of my sopranos (Ali Machado gets full credit for this thought) said, “You know, as I sing I think of those words like they are in different fonts. You know, like those inspirational quote signs?” My head exploded. I could NOT stop thinking about this idea. It’s SO TRUE. Singing in different fonts! My first mental response was to internally scroll through the roughly 47,243 “Live. Laugh. Love.” posters I’ve seen in my life. But as the day went on, I found myself noticing the use of different fonts for emphasis on various posters around the school and all over the internet. As with all these Choir Bites... this is just a chance to express a timeless idea (tone painting) from a new angle (singing in different fonts) that might resonate with our singers.