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Re: [ARSCLIST] Edward R. Murrow "Hear It Now", etc.
Hello Don,
These are all good points, and one has to respect the those of the past
, present and future who have perfected the ability to "think on their
feet" (as it were) in live situations.
In the Family Theater broadcasts, however, my hat is off also to our
usual composer/conductor, Harry Zimmerman, who was playing (a live
orchestra) the closing music cues behind Tony La Frano's voice overs.
His tempi always matched what Tony was saying and doing, so their
constant coordination is a wonderful creative thing to hear.
I must add that this speed up or down in tempo was a rarer occasional
situation, since the rehearsal timings must have been honed by the staff
in their professional experience in doing the show week after week
without any hiatus (they went year 'round unless preempted by political
conventions).
As a sidelight from across the Atlantic this quote regards the effect of
the BBC on the speech of the British:
http://www.onestopenglish.com/News/Magazine/Archive/standard.htm
In British English the notion of RP (Received Pronunciation) still
persists. Alternatively described as "the Queen’s English", "BBC
English" or "Oxford English", there appears, in some quarters at
least, the idea that there is some kind of standard we should aspire
to and that variations to that standard are somehow inferior.
Rod Stephens
Family Theater Productions
Don Tait wrote:
The discussion on this thread about the effect of broadcasting on American
speech and the speed with which radio announcers would speak "live" is very
interesting to me because I am both a collector fascinated by speech patterns
and am a radio announcer who does "live" work and knows what goes into it.
Perhaps it's off-topic, but since recordings preserve these things, perhaps it
isn't.
I have read (sorry, I can't remember where) that when the first radio
networks of sorts were begun in the 1920s, it was decided after discussion that the
"accent" to be used would be a Midwestern one. It was thought to be the
freeest of regional stresses (the South, New England, New York, et cetera). When
networks became national, that came to apply to all American broadcasting and
was adopted by all of the networks.
As for speaking slower or faster when credits and so on are being read
live, that's something an announcer must learn to do. It's a matter of knowing
what one has to say and watching the clock as it ticks away the seconds to the
time that one has to be finished. Those times are finite, especially in network
broadcasting. It requires thinking about what one is saying, has left to say,
and simultaneously concentrating on getting it finished on time. So one can
speak slower or faster depending upon the situation (sometimes a crisis).
None of this necessarily has to do with recordings of announcements from
the '30s, '40s or later if they might have been electronically sped up or slowed
down. And would that have been possible in the '30s, '40s, or even '50s?
Genuinely live is another matter.
Don Tait