#UofTGrad16: Learning the three B’s at convocation boot camp

As an associate professor (teaching stream) at the Faculty of Music, Michael Albano knows the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms).

He also has three of his own: breath, body language, and – more surprisingly – “be wrong with flair.” These are the maxims he applies as resident stage director of the opera training program and, annually, as a presentation coach at what is known informally as Convocation boot camp.

“You find a varying degree of extroversion,” Albano says of the deans, chairs and faculty members who are charged as University Readers with announcing the names of degree recipients as they ascend the stage of Convocation Hall. “Some do very well naturally. And some, despite extensive experience in classroom teaching, are reticent or shy.”

For four years Albano (right) has been applying the secrets of successful performance to the deceptively simple task of reading a name with clarity and precision.

Deep breathing is important. “Most of us in real life do shallow breathing, which can come from nervousness,” Albano says. “Even it doesn’t, it makes us sound nervous.”

A common habit is to inhale only as much air as we suppose to be necessary, with unfortunate results if a name is long and multisyllabic. “And when people are nervous, they gallop, they get faster and faster,” Albano adds. “It never occurs to them to stop and breathe.”

While there is not a great deal of movement involved in calling out names, body language can be critical. “When I first was asked to attend Convocation, I was concerned by people who were presenting graduates and seemed to be glaring at them,” Albano recalls.

“That comes out of the fact that we think our faces are neutral. They are not. When we listen with intensity or even great interest, you will find that a scowl appears on your face. Or at least that’s what it looks like to other people.”

Actions as simple as sitting and standing can give the wrong impression if not done with confidence and aplomb. “You have to look as if you want to be there, not that you have dragged yourself to be there,” Albano says. “We do little exercises to work on that.”

Albano’s “be wrong with flair” axiom might sound like a paradox but it is a helpful tool when thousands students are graduating. Not every name will be pronounced correctly.

The secret, Albano says, is not to be troubled by a stumble. “This is, curiously, rather difficult. I don’t whether it’s because we’re all being Canadian and apologetic, but people get tripped up terribly.

“The urge to apologize: you can’t get rid of it. We study professional news broadcasters who, when they make a mistake, just move on. They’re fantastic at it.”

Of course, to avoid an error in pronunciation is even better, which is why the boot camp (“reader training sessions” are what groups of four or five are officially summoned to attend) includes two experienced U of T linguists.

“More than half of our students are not speakers of English at home,” Professor Emeritus (and, with Albano, director of convocation Silvia Rosatone, former secretary of the Governing Council Louis Charpentier) boot camp co-founder Elizabeth Cowper said recently on the CTV television program Canada AM.

“So reading names is much more interesting and challenging than it used to be. There are so many more ways of getting it wrong.”

As part of the marshaling process, students are asked to write their names with pronunciation hints, but some are not familiar with the principles of phonetic transcription.

“Sometimes we make really interesting mistakes based on what the students have written,” Cowper said.

With or without guidance, the situation is complex. “Names like ‘Mohamed’ and ‘Ahmed’ sound quite different depending on whether the person speaks Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Tigrinya or Malay,” Cowper added in an email.

“And then there are names like Cowper and Smyth, which have two correct pronunciations each, though philologists might argue that one of them is more correct than the other. The first name Leslie has either an ‘s’ or a ‘z’ sound in the middle, and some people feel quite strongly that this correlates with the gender of the person. Not everyone agrees, however, including some people named Leslie.”

Often the ideal is unattainable, says Professor Christina Kramer from the department of Slavic languages and literatures. There might be no way of knowing whether a name with an “sz” consonant is Polish or Hungarian.

And there is such a thing as being too correct. A French name rendered with an extravagantly rolled “r” might sound pretentious. Nor is a pronunciation that conforms fastidiously to the national heritage of the name necessarily accurate. Many people use adapted pronunciations.

Kramer urges name-readers to seek a compromise that suggests knowledge of the source language but concedes the influence of English. Above all, the reader must make it clear that appropriate care has been taken.

“Our names are the most intimate things we have,” Kramer says. “Each comes with its own migratory history.

“What I want our readers to communicate is that we have given serious thought to each. We want to offer a reasoned, thoughtful and considerate pronunciation of each name.”

Read about Convocation Boot Camp in Metro

Watch an interview with Michael Albano on CTV

Read an interview with Christina Kramer and Michael Albano on cbc.ca