Abstract:
As both composing and performing multicultural choral music has increased, choral directors are required to obtain pronunciation of non-European languages. Many non-European languages are written in non-Romanized writing systems, but for convenience, the original lyrics are transcribed to the Roman alphabet in most choral music publications. Especially, Romanized Korean text in Korean choral music is often problematic due to inconsistencies in writing. Moreover, corresponding IPA symbols of Korean characters do not match current Korean diction materials. The purpose of this study is to seek a better way to represent Korean text in the publications. It was found that the Korean script (Hangeul) is necessary to represent Korean lyrics in printed music for recognizing the original words and the exact sounds. As Hangeul is an unfamiliar writing system, this document discusses Korean pronunciation using the principles of Hunminjeongeum (the original name of the Korean writing system) to facilitate non-Korean speakers. The corresponding phonetic features of Korean characters and IPA symbols were also analyzed to determine the most appropriate IPA symbols for Korean characters. Also, this document addresses several questions regarding inconsistency of the IPA symbols in the current Korean diction resources in the view of linguistic approach. For this reason, this document becomes more empirical than pedagogical. As the IPA symbols are used widely in diction manuals, the readers are required to have knowledge of the IPA symbols. The supplemental audio examples will be helpful to readers understand the Korean sounds. As a result, this document provides groundwork for a future publication of a Korean lyric diction manual and music publications for presenting Korean text in both Hangeul, along with the official Romanization with additional information such as an IPA transcription of the Korean choral text and a word-for-word English translation.
