IPA Source (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: IPA Source Abbey Thompson IPA Source. [Stephens City, Virginia]: IPA Source, LLC, 2003-. http://www.ipasource.com (Accessed 19 December 2014). [Requires a Web browser, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and an Internet connection. Pricing: Subscriptions for access to all content range from $59.95 to $600 per year; price is based upon the type of subscription (individual, studio, or institution), type of voice program, and number of registered voice students.] Introduction Launched in 2003 as an online support site for owner Bard Suverkrop’s voice and diction students, IPA Sourcehas since grown into a comprehensive online library of song and opera aria text translations/pronunciation guides. Intended as an aid to “singers, teachers, and all those interested in the correct and knowledgeable performance of vocal literature,” it claims to be the “largest collection of literal translations and International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions on the web.” 1All song and aria texts in the database can be individually downloaded in PDF format; each document includes music source information, the original-language text, a word-for-word English translation, and an IPA transcription. Some works also contain poetic translations in English when the literal translation makes the text’s sentiment unclear. According to Suverkrop, IPA Sourcecurrently serves three hundred schools worldwide and has a subscription list of approximately thirty thousand individual users. 2 Content & Coverage As of this review’s publication, IPA Sourceoffers translations/transcriptions of more than eleven thousand song and opera aria texts. Its online library currently contains texts in six source-languages (English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish) and Suverkrop plans to incorporate Russian and Hebrew texts in the near future. 3The available texts include all the standard repertoire one would expect to find for both undergraduate and graduate voice students in all vocal ranges, including the works of nearly one thousand composers and more than eight hundred poets/lyricists. Latin texts (both sacred and secular) are also included – a decided benefit for choral singers and conductors. While core repertoire is well-represented, arias and songs of a more peripheral or obscure nature are more hit-and-miss (though it is expected that more texts to fill these gaps will be added over time). Early opera is at least partially represented with select arias from seventeenth-century composers like Monteverdi, Peri, and Cavalli. The largest gap in coverage is a predictable one: due to copyright restrictions, IPA Sourceis only able to distribute texts from the public domain (primarily works published before 1923), so modern repertoire is largely missing from its library. That said, the holdings are quite comprehensive and essentially replace the need for a large swath of reference books that provide this same information, like Glass’s Schubert’s Complete Song Texts, Coffin’s Phonetic Readings of Songs and Arias, and other similar volumes (most of which are usually targeted to a single composer’s works). IPA Sourcecannot fully replicate or replace some print titles when it comes to opera, however, as not all recitative has been included; there is definitely a case to be made for keeping certain key [End Page 740]texts, like Nico Castel’s various books of librettos, even after licensing IPA Source. In addition to the thousands of texts it offers, IPA Sourcealso has many diction aids and resources available free of charge. The “Diction Help” page 4contains IPA vowel and consonant charts for each language in its collection as downloadable PDFs. Each language also has its own “translation and transcription help” sheet with excellent information about all aspects of its pronunciation and helpful references for further study. A variety of external Web sites are curated on this page to aid students in performing their own translations and transcriptions. Additional pages provide extensive information about the German Fach System of vocal classification. There are also MP3 sound recordings of selected texts read by a professional singer, but these recordings are difficult to find within the Web site and not cross-linked to the pages containing their respective texts. It would be very easy for most users to be unaware of the existence of these helpful recordings. Interface IPA Sourcerecently launched a new...