Adventures in Linguistics for Singers

My recent textbook Linguistics for Singers takes singers and other musicians who work with them through a wide range of linguistic features. While a great deal of work has been done on lyric diction, fewer resources take into account other concepts like grammar and prosody. A more holistic approach to the languages we sing allows us to more fully comprehend the music we are learning, ultimately resulting in more convincing and well-rounded performances.

In this talk, a series of case studies will show how applying concepts and research methods from linguistics can enrich our experiences of music with text.

First, I will explore the reconstruction of the phonetics of dead languages in choral music: a new setting by Jaakko Mäntyjärvi of the Old English poem The Seafarer required the choir to learn unfamiliar sounds, and reconstructing 12th-century Galician Latin for a performance of chant related to the Camino de Santiago meant applying historical linguistics to historical repertoire.

Next, I will discuss the process of making a surtitle translation for Poulima Salima’s Gaualofa, one of the first operas written in Samoan. This entailed close collaboration with the composer and his ‘aiga (family group) to find concise and culturally sensitive English equivalences for Samoan text. Last, I will share how dialectology informs the coaching of musical theatre repertoire in New Zealand, as students must navigate their home dialect as well as various British and American accents in this ever-growing corpus.

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.