This is what I feel like I'm being told when people say they think I sound like a Valley Girl.
For the record, I don't actually sound like a Valley Girl. My diction sounds more East Coast than West Coast, and that would be the influence of my parents. I tend to pronounce names such as Larry and Mary with that long flat A - you know what I mean. I'm thinking of that wonderful actress who plays Larry's wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His name sounds like "Lairy" and even "Leery" when she says it. Whereas Jeff's wife, an East Coaster, pronounces Larry as if it rhymed with yeah - ree. So when she calls him "La" for short, it rhymes with yeah.
That's how I talk. I didn't realize I was doing anything in particular, until people pointed out that I sound more East than West. To this day I love New York accents of every kind (there's more than one of course), and as soon as I hear someone's voice down the hall who's obviously from there, I get warm and fuzzy all over. When I was a kid our house would often be noisy with the din of our loud-talking and loud- laughing East-coast relatives, and a New York accent just makes me feel at home.
But I'm not doing anything deliberate with my diction on the air. The reason I don't change how I naturally speak for air, is that it would violate one of the first rules of radio - and there are fifteen or twenty first rules of radio, but this is the one I want to highlight today: Be yourself.
If you're doing anything other than being yourself on the air, you sound pretentious, and it's something I'm conscious of - keenly so - in other people's diction. A person who sounds great on the air doesn't really do anything differently from how they speak in real life. If you sound lofty, singsongy, announcery, if your words are all evenly spaced and you're going thunk - thunk - thunk because you've lost the natural rhythm of speech, if you sound like you're reading a script, if you start hitting your consonants with especial force, if you fall into a faux-English accent, that would all fall under the category of FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T DO THAT.
It's really disheartening sometimes to get email from listeners who think I sound too young, too American, and too uneducated to be on the air in a classical format. I get a batch of these about once a quarter. Sometimes people have a point, and I'm more than happy to concede it when they do. I know I speak too fast, for one thing. And everyone on the air has quirks. You just can't avoid it. I once received a complaint (about my pronunciation of Giaccomo) where the person told me that I really needed to shape up, because my co-worker's pronuniciations were impeccable. Her choice of word was revealing - my colleague was without sin in her mind. It wasn't actually true (because we all screw up on the air sometimes), but it shed some light on the intensity of feeling these folks become gripped by.
The thing is, most people love us. The ones who complain are a tiny fraction of our audience. And it's only a small percentage of those who are unkind in their tone. But they are very squeaky, and it takes tremendous self-possession - mental obduracy maybe - to resist being thrown off kilter by them.
What strikes me again and again is how relaxed the artists are about issues that really fire up some classical music lovers. From what I can gather, professional musicians are not snobs. They love music, they play it, they share their gift with others, and for the most part they're serene. Which is why I envy the heck out of them. Anyway, they don't get exercised about whether it's PUR-cell or pur-CELL, Ludwig VOHN or Ludwig VAN Beethoven. They just.don't.care.
I can't remember what point I was making now. I think I'll continue this later with another entry, and I'll wrap up my objections to audience objections. Because nobody cares about this but me...