Singing in tongues

Like I said the other day, one of the most noteworthy things about Mackay: the Black Bearded Bible Man (besides the awesome title) is that it's the first western style opera written in Taiwanese.  When I took on this role, I originally planned to study Taiwanese (just as I would if I were to sing a role in Czech or Portuguese or some other language that I didn't know), but was frustrated to find that there were almost no instructional materials out there.  I guess there's minimal demand nowadays because it's mainly older people here who speak Taiwanese fluently.  Some people my age and younger here speak it well, but many can hardly speak it at all.  It's a language whose existence is fragile because it has almost no written tradition, and because over the years, depending on the political climate, it's often been suppressed.  I have friends here who vividly remember being forced by their schoolteachers to wear humiliating signs, like dunce caps, for speaking Taiwanese in school instead of Taiwan's official language, Mandarin.  I'm only beginning to understand and appreciate the deep historical, political and emotional significance that the Taiwanese language has here.

When I received the score to the opera earlier this year, my part was completely in Chinese characters (even though Taiwanese is a non-written language, it can apparently still be written down, somewhat imprecisely, using a form of vernacular Chinese), and so I just dove in, learning the notes on the syllable "la", thinking about what I materials would need to ask the National Theater for next:

1) my part written in the score in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)
2) translation of the opera (including a word-by-word translation of my part)
3) a recording of my part being spoken very slowly
4) a recording of my part being spoken at a normal speed

As these study aids arrived over the next few months, I learned the part very slowly, a little bit every day (with some study sessions with my inlaws* in NJ on weekends), building up as good a foundation as possible over the summer.  And now that I'm here in Taiwan for 6 weeks of rehearsals, I'm surrounded by Taiwanese speakers who can help me polish my singing diction even more. 

This role also has a significant amount of spoken dialogue, ranging from when my character, fresh off the boat, haltingly struggles to master the Ten Commandments in Taiwanese, to the near end of his life when which he delivers soaring poetic speeches in praise of Taiwan.  I learned the speaking parts much like I learned the singing parts, except it took much longer because I also had to get a handle on the language's eight tones, which are:

1. high level
2. high falling
3. low
4. middle stopped
5. rising
6. middle falling
7. middle level
8. high stopped

(Not to mention the complex system of "sandhi", which are instances when a word's tone will change depending on the tones of the words surrounding it. This caused me great confusion at first because when someone would speak my lines slowly word by word, and then at a natural speed, many of the tones would be totally different!  About a third of the way down the Wikipedia article for Taiwanese, there's a great little audio file of someone demonstrating all the tones.)

So the speaking parts were actually what I spent the most time working on with my dear patient inlaws.  Not just getting the tones down, but also trying to get a feel for the rhythm and the rhetoric of the speeches---where to pause, which words to stress (trying to resist the very American tendency to emphasize words by making the tone "high falling", thus totally changing their meaning, which I still do when I get excited or careless).  Since I've been here in Taipei, I've also been going around asking many of my colleagues to speak my lines for me in all different ways into my trusty iPod recorder thingy, so I can hear my lines' different possibilities and not just parrot one recording.

There were many moments not long ago when I was learning this part and thought to myself: this is crazy;  I have no idea what I'm saying; I spend an hour learning three lines, and then the next day it's as if I'd never seen it before in my life.  My brain was melting. I felt like I was being punished for all the times I was amused by any of the countless Asian-singer-makes-funny-mistake stories that we all heard about in music school in America.  But now, knock on serious wood, it feels like it's magically all up there somewhere in my brain's folds, and this strange language is coming out of my mouth, and I feel like I know what I'm saying at almost every  moment...it's definitely more than rote at this point, and yet it's nowhere near being able to truly speak Taiwanese at all except through Mackay's words.  Maybe this is sort of what speaking in tongues feels like.

*coincidentally, Mackay, who married a Taiwanese woman, is often affectionately referred to as the "son-in-law of Taiwan"

Comments

[R J Keefe]

Holà! What a challenge! I hope that the emigré community here will want to have a ting-i-ting.

[Maury D'Annato]

I didn't realize Taiwanese was marginalized that way. I'm half reading a book about language death...in less apparently deliberate cases, you have to understand it as a kind of change that's always happening, but there's still a tragic dimension to it.