English has about twenty vowels, many of which are indefinite and closed-off and don't sing well. Italian, in contrast, has a lot of open vowels that sing beautifully, so it is clearly better for singing. In the United States, in the 1950s and 1960s, singers on the stage, in opera and music theatre, were trained to sing English words _using Italian vowel sounds._ This made a lovely sound but made the English sound strained, affected, and actually hard to understand.