Linguistics for Singers

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Following on from Gregory Camp’s L’ORFEO lecture ‘Adventures in Linguistics for Singers’ in June 2026, ‘Linguistics for Singers’ offers a practical workshop to develop participants confidence in applying linguistic principles to their work.

This workshop will explore a holistic language-based approach to vocal repertoire, showing how a grounding in linguistic concepts enables musicians to better understand and communicate the music they perform. Beginning with the sounds of language and moving up through larger levels of linguistic structure, from phonemes to words to sentences to full texts, participants will learn through examples from art song and opera how to connect these concepts to their own musical practice.

The workshop is supported by the University of Leeds International Strategy Fund as part of L’ORFEO’s ‘Rethinking Operatic Pedagogies’ project.

For further information contact [email protected]

Dr Gregory Camp is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Associate Head Teaching and Learning in the University of Auckland School of Creative Arts, where he teaches a wide variety of topics in musicology and music theory. He is also the artistic director of the University of Auckland Opera Workshop, for which he directs a production each year. His doctoral research, undertaken at the Queen’s College, Oxford, was on the modern performance history of the operas of Claudio Monteverdi. He has published two monographs with Routledge on mid-twentieth century film music: Howard Hawks: Sonic Style in Film (2020) and Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s (2021), and chapters on Disney choral arrangements, community singing in Disney texts, and the aesthetics of the Disney Channel Original Musical corpus. His most recent books are Linguistics for Singers (Routledge, 2023), a manual that guides musicians through the poetic texts they work with via a holistic and comparative approach, and Music in the Disney Parks (Routledge, 2026), the first monograph on theme park music. Current work includes an anthology of opera libretto translations under contract with Oxford University Press and further work on Disney music. A long-time choral singer, he sings regularly with the Auckland Chamber Choir and Voices New Zealand.