ORSINO: If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it.

One of the more challenging things an actor must tackle in trying to be more intelligible in a large venue is dealing with the tendency for final, post-vocalic (after a vowel) continuants to disappear. It isn’t that the actor doesn’t say these sounds, it is more that the acoustics of the space and the distance between speaker and listener make it difficult for the sound energy to go that far. In a phrase like Orsino’s above, sounds like /f, v/, reportedly the two most challenging sounds in English for actors, must be enhanced in some way, or else we risk a phrase that comes off as “ih music be the food of luh, gimme excess of it,” which seems to cheat the poetry of this famous line, the first in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

In this case, the fabulous imagery of the language, the rich palette of sounds it offers, and the weight of setting out this thought as the thesis of Orsino’s first argument, all combine to offer the actor plenty of reason to relish the language, to indulge in its particular qualities. One might argue that the repeated use of /f/ in if, food, and of /v/ in love, give, of is a form of consonance, a poetic device where repeated use of a particular consonant is done intentionally by an author to catch the listener’s ear. Actors are well served to embrace these devices as their own, in a “I’m a poet and I don’t even know it” kind of way, or possibly, like a freestyling rapper, who knows how to improvise in this style, and is particularly “on” in this moment. You must justify your use of language, and “because the author wrote it that way” isn’t a good enough excuse!

If you’ve been reading these posts for some time, you will realize that I’m always droning on about balance. Is it possible to gild this lily, to over do it? Of course it is! But that is a great place to begin, I figure. Overdoing it will set off your bullshit meter, and you will get a sense of the boundaries or limits to which you can go in indulging these continuants. Try this out loud:

Iffff music be the ffffood ovvvvv lovvvvve, play on, givvvvvve me excessss ovvv it.

Well, there you have it! It certainly IS possible to overdo it to the point of wrecking it! One thing this experiment did was to highlight what isn’t being done in this way. Did you notice how music and play on both seem to pop out because of their lack of these kinds of final consonants? I also noticed the possibility of relishing the plosion consonants at the end of music, and at the end of the phrase give me excess of it. Normally, I think we would be inclined to not release the /k/ at the end of music because it is going into the /b/ of be. And many of us rarely release final plosives at the ends of phrases, like the /t/ in it.

Being fricatives, /f, v/ give us a little vibratory sensory feedback on our lips as we speak them, especially the /v/. Speak the text again, but this time, relish that vibration. Imagine that your feelings of unrequited love are somehow oozing out through those sounds, your aching heart throbbing in the vibrations of your voice. Ultimately we don’t want to be thinking about consonants and intelligibility while we are acting, we want to be lost in the moment, so try marrying the sound sensation with the imagery, the moment of the text.

Now you might take a moment to speak all of Orsino’s first speech, and try to relish all the final continuants.

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

Earlier this week I did a post on Lightening your Dark L . Today we’ll compare that quality and exploration with the nature of vowel R’s.

What’s a vowel R you ask? We distinguish between two kinds of R generally— consonant R, where the /r/ in the spelling comes before a vowel, as in rose, red, around, and vowel R, where the /r/ in the spelling comes after a vowel, as in are, air, ear, or, her, poor. All /r/ sounds, vowel or consonant, are made with essentially the same gesture in the mouth of those with so-called rhotic speech, that is where the vowel R is pronounced. (In many accents, such as a standard British accent, aka Received Pronunciation, General Australian, etc., which are non-rhotic, these vowel R’s are unpronounced, and so we call these accents/speakers non-rhotic.) The degree of r-ishness, the strength of a speakers r-colouring or rhoticity, depends on how the speaker articulates their R’s. In the same way that an L can be either light or dark, we can think of R’s being made in a similar fashion.

The International Phonetic Association, or IPA, calls the consonant R an alveolar approximant. Its IPA symbol is /ɹ/.For some rhotic speakers this is true—I speak with such an articulation for my R sounds. Others speak with a variation from this articulation, with a molar R, where their tongue pulls back and forms a kind of wad of tongue near the back lower molars. The front edge of the tongue generally raises up, but may or may not feel like it is curling, and it’s likely to be quite far back from the alveolar ridge. This molar R is in some ways quite similar to the velarized L that we called the Dark L in our previous post. The back of the tongue is arched up near the soft palate (or velum), which accounts for the "darkness" of this strong R quality. Molar R and Dark L differ in how the front of tongue behaves which makes the two sounds very different from each other.

If you’re someone with a strong vowel R, how does that affect you? It is my belief that strong, dark vowel R does not impede intelligibility, but it does colour your speech in a way that is trapped back in your mouth, with may affect the surrounding vowels and consonants. Also, in terms of expanding the range of what you can do with your speech, strong dark vowel R tends to be hard to "let go of" when you’re trying to do a new accent that has some R colouring but not a lot. I strongly believe that a skilled actor should be able to modify their R colouring at will. So if you only make light R coloured vowels, you need to learn to be able to darken yours, and if you have dark R coloured vowels, you must learn to lighten them.

How to do it:

Start with a non-rhotic -err vowel [ɜ] (like at the end of the word sir without R colouring. Now, make the strongest rhotic version of this as possible. In IPA that would be written with lots of rhoticity diacritics, like this [ɜ˞˞˞˞˞]. Go back and forth between tons of rhoticity and none a few times: [ɜ˞˞˞˞˞ | ɜ | ɜ˞˞˞˞˞ | ɜ | ɜ˞˞˞˞˞]. Now, try gradually adding on the rhotic quality, so you slowly increase your r-ishness: [ɜ ɜ˞ ɜ˞˞ ɜ˞˞˞ ɜ˞˞˞˞ ɜ˞˞˞˞˞]. Now go the other way: [ɜ˞˞˞˞˞ ɜ˞˞˞˞ ɜ˞˞˞ ɜ˞˞ ɜ˞ ɜ]. Now find the middle spot, and stop there for a while on [ɜ˞˞]. Slowly blend back and forth between that and the non-rhotic [ɜ]. At this point, you need to focus in your attention on the most subtle movement of your tongue. What is the smallest amount of rhoticity that you could add? Tune that quality very carefully and once you have it sussed out, try applying it to some words:

• her, stir, fur, word, myrtle
• better, actor, colour

Now, try non-rhotic and lightly rhotic versions of centering diphthongs, allowing them to slide either to non-rhotic schwa or to very mildly r-colored schwa:

• beer, weird, clear, tier
• bare, chair, heir
• poor, tour, cure
• door, core, roar, war
• star, far, par, catarrh

Slightly more tricky are intervocalic R, that is /r/ between two vowels. We’ll save that for another day…