American accent in Symphony of a City, first reaction

I need to listen to this again to see if there’s more to be said about it (since it was broadcast over Varèse, which is very complex to listen to) but I think all the U.S. listeners are probably going, “wow, he tried an American accent!” right along with me. I was grading a paper while listening and I was so startled that I dropped my pen for a second.

Then I grabbed another piece of paper and started making notes.

Kudos for that, Mr. Armitage, especially after all the abuse Genevieve O’Reilly has taken for her accent in Spooks 8, of which you must be at least tangentially aware.

It really hit me because Ms. Fox read her first dos Passos excerpt with an American accent, but Mr. Armitage read his first dos Passos passage with his normal standard British accent and in a very literary mood. I thought, “wow, he reads that well, and he definitely gets the excitement of the passage, but I’ve always heard dos Passos in my head with a New York accent, and in not such a high literary mode. What makes dos Passos exciting (and innovative for his period) is his capturing of what the observers sees in the mood, idiom, and language of the man on the street.” And I thought, “oh well, makes sense for him not to do it, as he’s joked about his struggles with our accents before.” Who’d want to generate laughter about being a fake American?

And of course, he was fantastic with Wordsworth and Eliot. I’m not a big Eliot fan, but he of course spent a fair amount of time early in his career with the most well-known popular adaptation of Eliot’s work, so he must know something about how to read and interpret it. He definitely sold me on Wordsworth, who I find is usually read badly for my tastes. I often find the Romantic poets are read with too much emotion, and I liked the restraint in his voice, the signal of a potential for greater emotional depth that was being held back.

But he read the second dos Passos passage with an American accent!!!! Squee!!!! The thought of Richard Armitage with a credible American accent is enough to put an American fangrrrl into serious overdrive. OMG! The very thought!

Admittedly, and please don’t understand this as blistering criticism, but an attempt to be realistic: I’m not sold on him as an American by any means. Not just yet. Even so, he gets more than “thanks for playing” from me, anyway. I’m giving him a low B (something like 83%) — above average, but just. Of course, my students always say I am a hard grader.

Here goes from my notes after one listening.

Pluses: he gets the “r” consonant right (placing it at the edges of his mouth and audibly anchoring it with his cheek musculature — you wouldn’t be able to hear the effort if a native speaker were doing this, as you can with him, but the sound is right, and that’s so hard for most Englishfolk) and he properly places the vowels that precede and follow it in his mouth, so they come out clearly, are recognizable, and largely credible. He’s good on “i” and “e” all the way through. “a” and “o” are a little bit less convincing — in particular he can’t always distinguish short “a” from the diphthong “aw,” or rather, we can hear him working at it / adjusting it. Even so, this was Genevieve O’Reilly’s biggest problem — she couldn’t get the “r” and every time she tried, she propelled herself into a different group of vowels in an attempt to recover from it. You can also tell that he’s trying to sound like he’s from the East Coast, but he’s clearly not trying to ape a really pronounced, strikingly local accent from one of the boroughs (Queens, Brooklyn, etc.) which is too complicated even for the average American who isn’t from one of those places and probably would have overtaxed his powers at this point. You can tell that his vowel set is an attempt at a consistent, nondescript Easterner, and in terms of class markers he also hits what dos Passos was writing exactly right — he sounds like a young man from a working class neighborhood who’s describing what he sees with energy and excitement. He also clearly realized that the pronounced delivery of the explosive consonants (“p”, “b”, etc.) that he uses in his British literary readings was not going to transfer one to one to the New York accent, and pulled back from that. We don’t hear literary Armitage trying to ape a New Yorker — it is an actual, real, different voice and characterization that he reveals in this section and not just a posh, acted reading that drains the energy from dos Passos’s very gritty text. In the second excerpt he moves a lot closer to the energy of the dos Passos text than in the first one.

Minuses: I don’t think he yet has a coherent ideal of what a New York vowel set sounds like — most notably when a vowel is nasalized and why. (See remark about “a” vs “aw” above, and we could extend this to how exactly he finishes the long “o” vowel — his performance reveals that he certainly knows it’s supposed to be a diphthong in the direction of “aw,” but doesn’t quite have that down yet. Hint to Mr. Armitage: you’ve successfully hidden your English “ao,” but now move the end of the vowel more towards “r”.) He’s erased his own vowels for the most part but hasn’t really replaced them with a consistent new set in this passage. Also, every now and then he sounded like Tom from Sylvester or Aubrey from Venetia, i.e., like the late adolescents he’s played in audiobooks. I think part of why that is happening is that he seemed to move the vowels in this second dos Passos excerpt up in pitch from his own normal register and from the pitch of what he was reading earlier (which seems slightly deeper than his own natural register, in interviews, for example). This could have been an attempt to catch the tone of the narration in Manhattan Transfer, which is youthful and certainly absent of the weariness in either Wordsworth or Eliot, or just at the pitch level where he happens to hear the New York vowels in his own ear (for example, if his dialect coach is a woman he’ll hear those pitches differently than might be ideal). A bigger problem is that he’s still struggling to catch the rhythm of New York speech. This seemed to create a particular issue here because he has to recreate not only the rhythm of that speech in its normal tempo, but with the excitement and heightened tempo at which dos Passos’s prose moves, and (as noted above) he can’t use his usual toolkit, which relies on British theatre conventions, to accomplish that. But that last point — that last little bit of polish that makes him sound not only like a New Yorker, but like an actual reflection of dos Passos’s depiction of how a New Yorker sounds in describing something — would be a truly high level of achievement indeed, and not necessarily to be expected from a beginner. He may be trying to do too much all at once. Ms. Fox sounded more like an American than he did — but not at all like a New Yorker, not at all like dos Passos’s narration. I felt like she was playing not to fail, while Armitage was playing to win, and didn’t quite.

In sum: This was really pretty good, Mr. Armitage. Don’t be discouraged! Keep trying! I believe in you! You could be a really convincing American with just a little more work, I am absolutely certain!

What I love about your work, Mr. Armitage, is that I don’t ever feel like you are phoning it in. You are out on the ski slope traveling maybe just a little bit faster than common sense suggests is prudent, and you take us right along with you. As a result, your work never stops being exciting.

(And gosh. I love that the program ended with Byrd. The download of this is definitely going to be a keeper.)

~ by Servetus on September 12, 2010.