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Tim Smith, the Baltimore Sun’s music reviewer, makes a plea for supertitles for translations in vocal and choral concerts as well as operas:

I know my Mahler and I know my Latin Mass, but I still enjoy the opportunity to follow along with a text if I feel like it during a live performance. But I suspect many people don’t arrive knowing the score, as it were, and they may well leave the hall feeling less connected to the music simply because they couldn’t relate.

The cool thing about using projected titles at a concert is that people can’t drag out the complaint still occasionally heard about their use at the opera — that it distracts people’s attention from the action onstage. On most concert occasions, everyone just stands and sings anyway. So nothing would be lost, and so much gained, if audiences could effortlessly tune into the words just by glancing up or over, or wherever screens could be installed.

He acknowledges that there are practical problems involved for choirs which don’t have their own dedicated performance spaces (which is all of them), and that a laptop and screen might not be as effective.

This was discussed on a ChoralNet forum last year, but it’s a topic which could be revived. My question is, what do you do when different voice parts are singing different texts simultaneously, such as in a double fugue?


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Comments

  1. Allen,
     
    To answer your question, during a fugue one could project the main text (which is being “fugued”), perhaps projecting “(fugue)” along with it. Or, if very different lines of text are being sung (as in your double fugue), one could layer the lines of text in the projection. That might look like this:
     
    Grasshoppers doing the bluegrass dance, playing their fiddles as the ladies advance.
    But in the distance the jays approach, eyeing them some dinner.
    PHE-ROKA, PHE-ROKA, PHE-ROKA dinner at the dance.
     
    All my best,
     
    Tom

  2. Allen:  Good questions!  I would be delighted to use supertitles for choral concerts, if it were both cheap and easy to do so.  It is not.  Stages are not designed to make it easy.  Supertitles have to be prepared, equipment has to be accessed or set up, the titles have to be run during the performance, projectors are noisy and can’t sit in the middle of an audience, like anything else they can get out of synch or fall victim to equipment or operator failure, and yes, they ARE distracting.  (So are subtitles in a foreign movie, of course, and we learn to put up with those, too!)
     
    But your question about contrapuntal music seems to be a non-problem.  I assume that one would do what is done when translations are printed in programs:  give a straightforward translation and not a blow-by-blow sporting account!  But that does bring up the question of WHAT to project, the original language or a translation, which strikes me as a more significant question.
     
    All the best,
    John

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