Shaw was anything but passive about pronunciation, however: his concern was always for the sounds of language, and their utility in producing the same level of rhythmic precision and articulation in the chorus, that he got from the orchestra. I didn’t stay in Iowa for long but, because I did not return to a specifically early music-oriented milieu, I continued with my Iowa Latin: I had enough trouble teaching my college-age choirs the proper notes, and had little energy left to hound them about their Latin. Before long, I began singing with Robert Shaw, who used the Iowa Latin for everything. About this time I landed a teaching job back in Iowa-and happily returned to the “ecclesiatic” pronunciation people out there were using. I found myself wallowing in a morass of strongly held opinions, lacking the background to do anything with confidence. The options, as well as the consequences of making a wrong choice, mounted alarmingly. Through a rather intense immersion in early music, especially under the influence of Belle Bouche, Bel Parleur ( I have lost track of this book, even of the proper spelling of its title), I learned about German, French, English, even Swedish Latin, as well as appropriate pronunciation shifts related to dates and religious influences.

I first encountered German Latin several years later, under Margaret Hillis, and became accustomed to singing the Latin settings by German composers with this pronunciation. The choral pronunciation we termed “ecclesiastical Latin ” only later did I learn that we were using an Italiante pronunciation, greatly influenced by our upper Midwestern vowels. When I was in college, this issue did not exist, at least in Iowa: we pronounced the language one way in Latin class (weni, widi, wiki), and another in choir (veni, vidi, vichi). The “which Latin?” issue rears its head, relative to the Mahler 8 first movement (Veni, Creator Spiritus). This post by Bruce Tammen originally appeared on the Chicago Chorale blog here and is republished with the author’s permission.

Weni widi wiki