I always try to encourage my choirs to remove agressive ‘R’ sounds from their singing. Usually, the best way to accomplish this is to either replace the ‘R’ sound with an ‘uh’ for word endings, and to simply avoid the ‘R’ in other places.
After a few years of demonstrations and encouragement, I’ve finally found another way to get the point across…
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CannotBeSilent 
And there’s me trying to get even MORE Rs out of singers! I know what you mean though in English language, or even Latin songs. However, we do some amazing Eastern European gypsy songs where it’s almost compulsory to ROLL the Rs hugely, something my singers find very hard. Wanna swap some singers with me??!!
From the front of the choir: http://singing-thoughts.blogspot.com
Chris, the rolled ‘R’ is almost entirely a different animal, isn’t it? It’s hard to teach that sound; people either catch it almost immediately, or can hardly create it at all. One possible teaching exercise is to work on saying ‘Ud-der-ruh’ with upwards pressure on the body of the tongue. It might help, but only a little!
Maybe we can get together on my next trip to the UK and discuss _which_ singers to exchange – I’d certainly volunteer for the assignment. Or, we could just bring the whole group… btw, our next concert tour is to Germany in 2009; that should be a great experience.
You can hear some excerpts of our recordings at http://www.tgafc.org if you’re interested…
Take care!
Nice shirt! Turned out great!
Somehow i missed the point. Probably lost in translation 🙂 Anyway … nice blog to visit.
cheers, Versifier.
“the point” was just a fun, visual way to tell my Atlanta-based chorus not to over-emphasize the “R” sound. They enjoyed the t-shirt….