Languages inherently good/bad for singing

Cafe Society
1

I’m wondering if certain languages are inherently bad/good for singing in an “American style”, and what languages are just most commonly not song in that style whether or not they are inherently predisposed to being sung in that manner.

To give an example, I saw the movie “La Vie En Rose” yesterday about the life of the singer Edith Pilaf, who supposedly characterized the soul of France with her singing. Altho the singer was played by an actress, they used actual recordings of Edith for the singing. While the singing was in a sense beautiful - it was heartfelt and powerful and smooth, and the lyrics were beautiful too, the style of singing just didn’t seem appealing.

Beyond the fact that it didn’t rhyme, it seemed like the music and melody was kind of incidental, the words didn’t seem to be written in a song like fashion, and it seemed like there were too many words trying to fit into each bar. It was almost like prose rather than poetry, as though one had decided to sing a nice essay instead of reading it, with background music added just for ambiance rather than melody.

I understand that songs don’t have to rhyme to sound nice, but songs that don’t rhyme usually have some kind of consistent melody and rhythm with repeating patterns, and even if there are no strict rhymes, there is usually some similarity in the flow of the words that is similar to the feeling of rhyme.

I was thinking this might be related to the structure of the language. English has a lot of words with disparate origins, multiple meanings for words, and meanings served with several different words with slight nuances. It also doesn’t have the same structure for ending words to mean different tenses and matching adjective endings with noun endings, etc. This probably gives it more flexibility for rhyming and matching rhythm and flow.

On the other hand, while I’ve heard many Spanish songs styled in similar ways to Edith’s songs, a lot of the more modern Spanish music especially pop and rock en español from singer like Juanes are sung in the American style.

So which languages do you think are inherently not compatible with the American style, which are inherently more difficult but still are often sung in the American style, and which do you think can easily be sung in any style but it’s just not done? Are there any genres of English language songs that typically sung in the Edith style?

2

I spent a month in China and since the language itself is tonal there is very little you can do with sung lyrics that wont change their meaning so (at least to me) everything from traditional to pop is hard on the ears. Urdu and Hindi sound great when sung.

3

Agreed. Singing in Chinese loses the tones, and the lyrics pretty much suck. (Then again, maybe it’s because I was playing the wrong karaoke LDs and I got all the annoyingly emo love ballads.) On the other hand, Chinese rap is awesome.

I like listening to Japanese songs, even though I don’t understand half the lyrics. There’s just something nifty about them. (The occasional badly pronounced English word does pull me out of the song a bit, though.)

4

Deep Forest’s Comparsa has a bunch of songs in other languages that sound great - they are a mix from all over the world, Europe, Africa, and South America.

5

Klaus Meine, lead singer of German heavy metal band The Scorpions, once explained why he sings in English instead of German: “When you combine a harsh language like German with harsh music like heavy metal, it just comes out like ‘kgrnnnnchg’.” (I may have misremembered the exact combination of letters used to represent the sound he made :smiley: )

6

German is a pain in the butt to sing in. I tried singing a couple of classical solos in German in high school, and I could never figure out if I actually really hated the shepherd lad I supposedly was infatuated with and was just singing this love song as an elaborate joke, or if I was pissed at him for spending all that time with the sheep. Maybe when I’d drawn the poor sucker close enough, I would gather up the phlegm I had summoned with all the gutturals and hock a loogie right in his eye.

7

I’d have to chime in with agreement about Chinese and German. I can’t imagine them sounding listenable in ‘American’ format.

Some Korean R&B sounds really good, IMHO, though.

8

Hebrew is a gorgeous language when sung. I love the Hebrew part of “Believe” from Prince of Egypt, for example. There have been a few of Israeli entries in the Eurovision Song Contest in Hebrew too, all beautiful.

9

I’ll third (fourth?) German - German hip hop is especially unlistenable, as it is against the very nature of the German language to flow.

10

Well when the songs are sung, they totally ignore tones, so I don’t think that’s really a problem. What does get me:

  1. The amount of permissible sounds and sound combinations in Mandarin is significantly less than in English, which limits the variety and styling of the overall word sound. For example, just off the top of my head, the following are not in Mandarin: “nk”, “th” (both aspirated and not). “nd”, “pl”, “pr”, “ps”, "tr, etc. What consonants can end a syllable are very limited.

  2. Since each syllable is character based, you can’t screw around as much with them. For example, you can sing “anti-Semetic” this way: an…ti-semetic, or even ant…i-semetic. However, in Mandarin, you’d be hard-pressed to break up syllables this way. Like jianchang (strong of spirit or character) would sound totally fucked up this way: ji…anchang

Mandarin (to my ears anyway) is indeed an unfortunate language for music.

11

Lord, I was coming in here to say the opposite. I think Hebrew sounds pretty lousy sung. It’s just not a particularly attractive language to listen to, imho. Neither is Arabic.

12

I disagree.

13

It did rhyme, at least in the original French versions. Maybe not where you expect it to rhyme, though.

One of the reasons many Spanish songwriters give to prefer writing in English is that English rhymes are so much easier than Spanish ones. They’re also very different; Spanish rima consonante requires the rhyming verses to end in exactly the same vowels and consonants… in asonante, it’s only the vowels. A Spanish poem or song that’s rima consonante is expected to combine several rhyming motifs (if every single verse ends in the same sounds it moves from “poetry” to “shit”); in English you often see songs where every other verse ends in -ing and nobody twitches an eyebrow.

A classic example, the letters at the end mark which verses rhyme with which in this sonnet:

Un soneto me manda hacer Violante, (a)
que en mi vida me he visto en tal aprieto; (b)
catorce versos dicen que es soneto: (b)
burla burlando van los tres delante. (a)

Yo pensé que no hallara consonante (a)
y estoy a la mitad de otro cuarteto; (b)
mas si me veo en el primer terceto (b)
no hay cosa en los cuartetos que me espante. (a)

Por el primer terceto voy entrando (c)
y parece que entré con pie derecho, (d)
pues fin con este verso le voy dando. (c)

Ya estoy en el segundo, y aun sospecho (d)
que voy los trece versos acabando; (c)
contad si son catorce, y está hecho. (d)

14

I used to know a latvian woman who would burst into song, well, pretty much any time we didn’t give her enough gear to keep her from bursting into song. Unfortunately, the chorus sounded just like “grande testes RA RA RA!”.

15

Run out right now and listen toDudu Fisher.

I collect foreign language versions of Broadway shows, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. The Korean Evita was awful. The Korean Phantom was reasonably good. The three Japanese Phantom CDS were excellent, good, and good. The Japanese Aspects of Love was awful. Czech Superstar was awesome, Czech Evita really good (anything with Dan Barta is good). German scores good wih Joseph, CATS and Phantom. The Russian Chicago is so good that everyone who hears it wants a copy!

Half of it is the translation (good translators made beaucoup bucks) and half is the singers. There’s good music and bad music in every language.

16

I’m not sure the OP means by “American Style” (Public Enemy? Rogers and Hammerstein? Tom Waits? Ella Fitzgerald? Bob Dylan?), but I think that Piaf was probably more about that particular cabaret style than anything inherent in French. Have you heard any jazz/cabaret sung in English? I’ve certainly heard English sung with the voice moving more across the accompaniment than with it, playing with the meter and stretching out words then compressing a bunch of words into one measure, even dropping out from song to speak a phrase here and there (if you don’t want to go to Jazz to find this, listen to some live Willie Nelson). And I’ve heard at least one or two smooth lyrical songs in French.

However, since we seem to be talking about musical languages in general, it seems almost inconceivable that it took 15 posts before we got to Italiano. Even when you’re just speaking Italian, you’re basically singing. [\Eurocentricism Off]

17

Or arguing, caro mio, they’re very good at arguing. And coming from a Navarrese (we and our Basque neighbors consider arguing a sport), that’s high praise.

Annie, if you ever happen to go to Barcelona, see if you can catch a Dagoll Dagom show. They’ve done both works written by themselves and translated ones, including several Rogers and Hammerstein ones (El Mikado is the one coming to mind now).

18

I find that songs in any mellow sort of style tend to sound good in Japanese–ballads, slow jazzy numbers, torch songs, and the like. There’s sort of an extra layer of rhythm in the lyrics that complements the basic mellowness of the song.

Screechy J-Pop and Japanese country music, on the other hand, could well have a whole circle of Hell dedicated to them.

19

I see what you’re saying, but that’s not quite the kind of “flow” I meant.

20

I actually like a few Chinese songs. Rather, I should say songs in Chinese; one is a translation of “I’ll Make A Man Out Of You” from Mulan, sung by Jackie Chan. I have no idea how they translated the song to make it fit, but it rhymes and matches the instrumentals of the music perfectly, and the scant Chinese I know suggests the essentials are carried over. There’s also a bit of Chinese pop music I used to like that unfortunately I can’t find any more.

I second Hindi for being a great language to sing in. There are plenty of Indian songs that are just a trip to listen to.