Bookshelf

Chu, Katherine, and Juliet Petrus. Singing in Mandarin: A Guide to Chinese Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. Cloth, xv, 359 pp., $90.00. ISBN 978-1-5381-3141-1. Paper, $45.00. 978-1-5381-3142-8. eBook $42.50. 978-1-5381-3143-5. www.rowman.com

Mandarin, a language spoken by more than a billion people, is the subject of the latest volume in the Guides to Lyric Diction series, authored by Katherine Chu, a collaborative piano faculty member at Tianjin Juilliard School, and soprano Juliet Petrus, a leading Western interpreter of Chinese contemporary vocal music. The first part of the book presents the sounds of Mandarin Chinese and how to pronounce them, while the second part offers an introduction to Chinese vocal literature.

Mandarin, the most common dialect of the Chinese territory, is a pictorial language that is tonal in nature. Pinyin, a spelling system using the Roman alphabet to indicate both pronunciation and tone, has made Mandarin more accessible to non-native speakers. As the most widely used transliteration system for the language, Pinyin serves as the basis for the pronunciation instructions in this text. Chu and Petrus recommend that readers learn and pronounce Pinyin directly, but they include the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) because it is familiar to most singers.

The tonal quality of Mandarin makes speaking the language challenging. In vocal music, however, the melodic line addresses this component, enabling the singer to concentrate on the correct pronunciation of the vowels and consonants. While Chu and Petrus encourage the reader to practice spoken Chinese tones, they underline that this aspect of Mandarin lyric diction is predetermined by the composer.

The authors begin with a discussion of consonants and vowels common to Western languages before addressing those that are not. Sounds not used in Western languages include retroflex consonants (those articulated at the alveolar area by curling the tongue) and apical vowels (in which the tongue remains in the position of the preceding consonant). Since IPA symbols do not exist for apical vowels, the authors assigned symbols with which the singer may already have a sound association. They point out that the sounds delineated by Western speakers as vowels and consonants are considered "finals" and "initials" in Chinese. The authors methodically explain the pronunciation of diphthongs, nasals, and glides, as well as the intricacies of stressed syllables and glottal separations. All sounds are demonstrated by two native Mandarin speakers, soprano Zhou Xiaolin and bass Wu Wei, on a correlated website. The authors also offer advice on balancing classical Western singing technique with accurate Mandarin pronunciation.

The second part of the book is devoted to an overview of Chinese vocal literature. The history of song is inexorably linked to political and cultural events, and although singing has always played an important role in Chinese culture, the greatest evolution of the art song has occurred during the last century. Chu and Petrus trace the lineage the genre from Hsiao Yiu-mei (1884–1940), regarded as the father of modern Chinese music, to contemporary composers Chen Yi (b. 1953), Bright Sheng (b. 1955), and Tan Dun (b.1957), with illuminations of developments in Taiwan and Hong Kong. IPA transcriptions for five songs are included, and there are more than 100 music examples.

Supplementary material includes a catalogue of the recorded examples available on the correlated website. Appendixes include a table of Pinyin correlated to the IPA symbols, a list of music examples contained in the book, and a list of notable Chinese poets. The final appendix contains sources for music and resources for study.

Singing in Mandarin is the fifth volume in the lyric diction series inaugurated with Singing in Czech by Timothy Cheek (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001; reviewed in Journal of Singing 58, no. 5 [May/June 2002]: 450–451). Cheek's book served as the template for subsequent texts devoted to lyric diction for Greek, Polish, and Portuguese. Like its predecessors, this text offers detailed guidance for singers who wish to study a language and repertoire frequently overlooked. In their discussion of pronunciation, Chu and Petrus write: "It is simply not possible to force a...