My search for new and interesting Advent Christmas music, last summer, yielded a lovely carol from Iceland: Immanuel oss í nátt, which first appeared in a collection of songs, Hymnodia Sacra, in 1742. Both text and melody are thought to be the work of Gudmundur Högnason; we are singing an arrangement for SATB choir by contemporary Icelandic composer Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson. Neither I nor any member of the Chorale entered this project with any experience with the Icelandic language; and the pronunciation guide included with the music, while helpful as far as it goes, is general and simplified, omitting much of what makes the language interesting and challenging.
We found a couple of recordings on Youtube, one by a professional Swedish choir, the other by an amateur Icelandic choir. The latter is very clear and precise; the former is very beautiful, but lacks the linguistic precision we as Americans need to have modeled for us. Using both of them proved to be the best thing. Our accompanist, Kit Bridges, who has taught singers’ diction at DePaul University for many years, was able to come up with a detailed IPA version of the text, which he taught to the singers sound by sound, word by word. And finally, Slava Gorbachov, a linguist who has been an enormous help to us over the years in learning Church Slavonic, and who has done work in Old Icelandic, came to one of our rehearsals and helped us refine some particularly troublesome vowels. He also pointed us toward some particularly good demonstrations and explanations of the language on YouTube. It turns out Icelandic is known to be a knotty language, presenting challenges that don’t exist in the other Scandinavian languages and requiring lots of drilling.
Why bother? The “singing translation” included in our music would suffice, and make the carol easily accessible to our listeners. Learning the Icelandic has taken an inordinate amount of time away from rehearsing other music, as well as a good deal of at-home drilling and repetition.
We do this because that is how Chorale rolls. The challenge energizes us. Our singers understand and are intrigued by this work, and aren’t afraid of it. Working in numerous languages makes us citizens of the world. And we know that vocal music is special, set apart from purely instrumental music, because of the words, which, in good repertoire, are as important as the music, and inform the decisions made by the composer and the performers. This marriage of words and notes is what grabs us and makes us singers. Undertaking the challenge of learning Icelandic is what makes us Chorale.