The Head Voice and Other Problems Part 5

TWO THINGS INVOLVED

There is nothing in voice training that is necessarily mysterious and inscrutable. On the contrary, if one will acquaint himself with its fundamental principles he will find that the truth about voice training, like all truth, is simple and easily understood, and when understood the element of uncertainty is eliminated. These principles are few in number, in fact they may all be brought under two general heads. The first is =KNOW WHAT YOU WANT=. The second is =HAVE THE CONDITIONS RIGHT=. The meaning of these statements can never be learned from a study of vocal physiology; nevertheless they contain all of the law and the prophets on this subject. Any musician may be a successful teacher of singing if he will master them. I use the word _musician_ advisedly, because musical sense is of such vital importance that no amount of mechanical knowledge can take its place. To undertake the training of voices with only a mechanical knowledge of the subject is a handicap which no one can overcome.

It is universally true that the less one knows of the art of singing the more he concerns himself with the mechanism; and it is also true that the more one is filled with the spirit of song the less he concerns himself with the construction of the vocal instrument. People with little or no musicianship have been known to wrangle ceaselessly on whether or not the thyroid cartilage should tip forward on high tones.

It is such crude mechanics masquerading under the name of science that has brought voice training into general disrepute. The voice teacher is primarily concerned with learning to play upon the vocal instrument rather than upon its mechanical construction, two things which some find difficulty in separating.

KNOW WHAT YOU WANT

This means much. In voice production it means the perfect tone concept.

It means far more than knowing what one likes. What one likes and what he ought to like are usually quite different things. What one likes is the measure of his taste at that particular time and may or may not be an argument in its favor. I have never seen a beginner whose taste was perfectly formed, but the great majority of them know what they like, and because they like a certain kind of tone, or a certain way of singing, they take it for granted that it is right until they are shown something better. This error is by no means confined to beginners.

If your pupil does not produce good tone one of two things is responsible for it. Either he does not know a good tone or else the conditions are not right. In the beginning it is usually both. Your pupil must create his tone mentally before he sings it. He must create its quality no less than its pitch. In other words _he must hear his tone before he sings it and then sing what he hears_. Until he can do this his voice will have no character. His voice will be as indefinite as his tone concept, and it will not improve until his concept, which is his taste, improves. Inasmuch as everything exists first as idea, it follows that everything which is included in the rightly produced voice and in interpretation are first matters of concept. The singer uses a certain tone quality because he mentally conceives that quality to be right. He delivers a word or phrase in a certain way because that is his concept of it.

A word at this point on imitation. One faculty of a musical mind is that of recording mentally what it hears and of producing it mentally whenever desired. Most people possess this in some degree, and some people in a marked degree. Almost any one can hear mentally the tone of a cornet, violin, or any instrument with which he is acquainted. In the same way the vocal student must hear mentally the pure singing tone before he can sing it. It is the business of the teacher to a.s.sist him in forming a perfect tone concept, and if he can do this by example, as well as by precept, he has a distinct advantage over the one who cannot.

Arguments against imitation are not uncommon, and yet the teachers who offer them will advise their students to hear the great singers as often as possible. Such incongruities do not inspire confidence.

On this human plane most things are learned by imitation. What language would the child speak if it were never allowed to hear spoken language?

It would never be anything but

"An infant crying in the night.

And with no language but a cry."

There are but few original thinkers on earth at any one time. The rest are imitators and none too perfect at that. We are imitators in everything from religion to breakfast foods. Few of us ever have an original idea. We trail along from fifty to a hundred years behind those we are trying to imitate.

When there is little else but imitation going on in the world why deny it to vocal students? The argument against imitation can come from but two cla.s.ses of people--those who cannot produce a good tone and those who are more interested in how the tone is made than in the tone itself.

The following are the qualities the teacher undertakes to develop in the student in preparing him for artistic singing. They are fundamental and must be a part of the singer's equipment no matter what method is employed. They are what all musicians expect to hear in the trained singer. They all exist first as concepts.

An even scale from top to bottom of the voice.

Every tone full of strength and character.

A sympathetic quality.

Ample power.

A clear, telling resonance in every tone.

A pure legato and sostenuto.

Perfect freedom in production throughout the compa.s.s.

A perfect swell, that is, the ability to go from pianissimo to full voice and return, on any tone in the compa.s.s, without a break, and without sacrificing the tone quality.

The ability to p.r.o.nounce distinctly and with ease to the top of the compa.s.s.

Equal freedom in the delivery of vowels and consonants.

Sufficient flexibility to meet all technical demands.

An ear sensitive to the finest shades of intonation.

An artistic concept or interpretive sense of the highest possible order.

The process of acquiring these things is not accretion but _unfoldment_.

It is the unfoldment of ideas or concepts. The growth of ideas is similar to that of plants and flowers. The growth of expression follows the growth of the idea, it never precedes it. From the formation of the first vowel to the perfect interpretation of a song the teacher is dealing with mental concepts.

At the Gobelin Tapestry works near Paris I was told that the weavers of those wonderful tapestries use twenty-four shades of each color, and that their color sense becomes so acute that they readily recognize all of the different shades. Now there are about as many shades of each vowel, and the mental picture of the vowel must be so definite, the mental ear so sensitive, that it will detect the slightest variation from the perfect form. Direct control could never accomplish this. Only the automatic response of the mechanism to the perfect vowel concept can result in a perfect vowel.

All of those qualities and elements mentioned above as const.i.tuting the artist come under the heading =KNOW WHAT YOU WANT=.

The second step =HAVE THE CONDITIONS RIGHT= means, in short, to free the mechanism of all interference and properly manage the breath. This getting rid of interference could be talked about indefinitely without wasting time. It is far more important than most people suspect. Few voices are entirely free from it, and when it is present in a marked degree it is an effectual bar to progress. So long as it is present in the slightest degree it affects the tone quality. Most students think they are through with it long before they are.

This interference, which is referred to as tension, rigidity, throatiness, etc., is in the nature of resistance to the free emission of tone. It is not always confined to the vocal cords, but usually extends to the walls of the pharynx and the body of the tongue. The vocal cavities, the pharynx and mouth, exert such a marked influence on tone quality that the least degree of rigidity produces an effect that is instantly noticeable to the trained ear. These parts of the vocal mechanism which are so largely responsible not only for perfect vowels, but for perfect tone quality as well, must at all times be so free from tension that they can respond instantly to the tone concept. If they fail to respond the tone will be imperfect, and these imperfections are all cla.s.sed under the general head "throaty." Throaty tone means that there is resistance somewhere, and the conditions will never be right until the last vestige of it is destroyed. The difficulty in voice placing which so many have, lies in trying to produce the upper tones without first getting rid of resistance. This condition is responsible for a number of shop-worn statements, such as "bring the tone forward,"

"place the tone in the head," "direct the tone into the head," etc. I recall a writer who says that the column of breath must be directed against the hard palate toward the front of the mouth in order to get a resonant tone. Consider this a moment. When the breath is properly vocalized its power is completely destroyed. Any one may test this by vocalizing in an atmosphere cold enough to condense the moisture in his breath. If he is vocalizing perfectly, he will observe that the breath moves lazily out of the mouth and curls upward not more than an inch from the face. The idea that this breath, which has not a particle of force after leaving the vocal cords, can be directed against the hard palate with an impact sufficient to affect tone quality is the limit of absurdity. If the writer had spoken of directing the sound waves to the front of the mouth there would have been an element of reasonableness in it, for sound waves can be reflected as well as light waves; but breath and sound are quite different things.

What does the teacher mean when he tells the pupil to place the tone in the head? He doubtless means that the student shall call into use the upper resonator. If one holds a vibrating tuning-fork before a resonating tube, does he direct the vibrations into that resonating cavity? No. Neither is it necessary to try to drive the voice into the cavities of the head. Such instructions are of doubtful value. They are almost sure to result in a hard unsympathetic tone. They increase rather than diminish the resistance. The only possible way to place the tone in the head is to let it go there. This will always occur when the resistance is destroyed and the channel is free.

In numerous instances the resistance in the vocal cords is so great that it is impossible to sing softly, or with half voice. It requires so much breath pressure to start the vibration, that is, to overcome the resistance, that when it does start it is with full voice. In a majority of male voices the upper tone must be taken either with full chest voice or with falsetto. There is no _mezza voce_. This condition is abnormal and is responsible for the "red in the face" brand of voice production so often heard.

Of this we may be sure, that no one can sing a good full tone unless he can sing a good _mezza voce_. When the mechanism is sufficiently free from resistance that a good pianissimo can be sung then the conditions are right to begin to build toward a _forte_.

Further, when the mechanism is entirely free from resistance there is no conscious effort required to produce tone. The singer has the feeling of letting himself sing rather than of making himself sing.

The engineer of a great pumping station once told me that his mammoth Corliss engine was so perfectly balanced that he could run it with ten pounds of steam. When the voice is free, and resting on the breath as it were, it seems to sing itself.

An ill.u.s.tration of the opposite condition, of extreme resistance was once told me by the president of a great street railway system that was operated by a cable. He said it required eighty-five per cent of the power generated to start the machinery, that is, to overcome the resistance, leaving but fifteen per cent for operating cars. It is not at all uncommon to hear singers who are so filled with resistance that it requires all of their available energy to make the vocal instrument produce tone. Such singers soon find themselves exhausted and the voice tired and husky. It is this type of voice production rather than climatic conditions, that causes so much chronic laryngitis among singers. I have seen the truth of this statement verified in the complete and permanent disappearance of many cases of laryngitis through learning to produce the voice correctly.

The second step in securing right conditions is the proper management of the breath.

BREATH CONTROL

An extremist always lacks the sense of proportion. He allows a single idea to fill his mental horizon. He is fanciful, and when an idea comes to him he turns his high power imagination upon it, and it immediately becomes overwhelming in magnitude and importance. Thereafter all things in his universe revolve around it.

The field of voice teaching is well stocked with extremists. Everything involved in voice production and many things that are not, have been taken up one at a time and made the basis of a method.

One builds his reputation on a peculiar way of getting the tone into the frontal sinuses by way of the infundibulum ca.n.a.l, and makes all other things secondary.

Another has discovered a startling effect which a certain action of the arytenoid cartilages has on registers, and sees a perfect voice as the result.

Another has discovered that a particular movement of the thyroid cartilage is the only proper way to tense the vocal cords and when every one learns to do this all bad voices will disappear.

Another has discovered something in breath control so revolutionary in its nature that it alone will solve all vocal problems.

Perhaps if all of these discoveries could be combined they might produce something of value; but who will undertake it? Not the extremists themselves, for they are barren of the synthetic idea, and their sense of proportion is rudimentary. They would be scientists were it not for their abnormal imaginations. The scientist takes the voice apart and examines it in detail, but the voice teacher must put all parts of it together and mold it into a perfect whole. The process is synthetic rather than a.n.a.lytic, and undue emphasis on any one element destroys the necessary balance.