Up and running!

I am perplexed at how the Idol producers choose the contestants for the show. Even now that the show is waning in popularity, there are tens of thousands of people who show up for auditions. Being very conservative, let's say a total of 20,000 people audition. (Adam said it was 100,000 his year).  Then, let's say that just 1% are really good. You still end up with 200 very strong contestants. From there, pick 10% with the best look and most compelling back story. That SHOULD produce a strong, interesting, talented top 20.

But, nooooo. They are obviously casting the show using other criteria. But what? Are they intentionally choosing contestants who are "sorta" talented but not extraordinary? Contestants who the audience can identify with because they are like the guy in study hall or the girl who sings karaoke in church? Is the idea that to make a fairy tale come true you have to start with a girl in rags and cinders, beaten and downtrodden, so that you can turn her into a princess by the end of 18 weeks? I just don't get what they are doing with casting, but they aren't ending up with winners who are ready to make their mark in commercial pop music!

Just wanted to drop this off, to add to a discussion we had earlier, about closing sounds, and how important it is to pronounce them.

Somebody posted an interview with Jessye Norman yesterday, but I can not find the short version that was posted anymore, instead I find this longer version on youtube. But to make my point, you would only have to listen to about the first two minutes or so.

Listen, how carefully JN closes out all her sylables, i.e. the word 'band'. You can clearly hear both the n and the d sound, when she speaks. She is speaking in front of an audience, and so she is trained to over-pronounce, in order to reach everybody, even those sitting in the back, with her speech.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7747whiFrvQ

Now, it is rather interesting for me to hear this, because I presume, that growing up in Augusta, Georgia in the 1940s, this was not the English she would have learned at home. Which means, she had to learn this form of public speaking, somewhere, not sure, where she had that opportunity to learn it. It reminds me of my German relatives in Switzerland, who learn high German as a first foreign language. They happen to do so in school. Of course, I don't know what her situation was, except that she grew up in a family that was culturally enriching her in many ways, so maybe she received the opportunity somewhere during her school years, or maybe later, at university. I cannot speak for JN, but in general,  Opera singers need to learn to be fluent in Italian, and also need to be able to sing in German and French, and still use intelligible pronunciation, so they are used to studying foreign languages, but my impression is, that she is using this made for TV English like a foreign language. It is an English that is such, that it can be easily understood both in Europe as well as America. Quite a skill, and on top of it, she pronounces in the way she would need to do for singing. What a concentration this would take, if it were not trained into her to do automatically, without thinking about it.
 Just give it a listen for a few minutes. ( or for the whole interview, if you want and have time - have not been able to do that myself, but might a bit later tonight)

ETA: I have since listened to the whole interview and it is well worth the listen, if you have the time.

This discussion ties into a frustration I tweeted about tonight while watching The Voice - in the battle rounds the judges seem to be continually choosing the ones that they feel they can "develop" as opposed to the better singers. I mean WTF, this isn't choir practice at the local school, it's a competition and do you want the best singer to win or not?

And the mystery continues - but at least the spectacularly tattooed theatre boy I posted above got through (thank goodness for Ricky Martin). The other thing that amazes me is they have two pretty good singers and a few somewhat average ones so let's put the good ones against each other so one gets knocked out early while because then the average ones go against each other one of them gets through... ARGHHHHHHHH sacrificial lambs for later on perhaps...