MUSICAL COURIER
8
January 26, 1922
LEARNING TO SING
Vocal Methods Good and Bad—Every System Cannot be Right—French Statistics
BY CLARENCE LUCAS
Copyrighted, 1922, by The Musical Courier Company,
“Drawing the loicer jaw side his collar.”
got from Christian Science. We hope we are offending no one’s religious susceptibilities when we express a doubt of the efficacy of any religion as a vocal method. If religious fervor made a man sing well, the muezzin who calls the Mohammedan believers to prayer ought to be a magnificent baritone. Is he? If strict attention to religious fervor and high wind pressure are bound to make good singers, what is the matter with the singing apparatus of a devoted soldier of the Salvation Army?
A Vocal Cello Buzz
“Wonderful ! Wonderful !”
We recall an unpleasant quarter of an hour we spent
with a vocal expert in a New York restaurant a few years ago. His hobby was the “cello buzz.” Every voice should have the buzzing edge of a cello tone on it. Our meal was happy and our conversation an artistic blend of dignity and wit, until some chance word started him off on the importance of the “cello buzz.” It was as potent in unloosing his tongue as was the name of Amadis de Gaul to Don Quixote when Cardenio inadvertently referred to him.
The other diners in the restaurant turned around to look at us. Some of them were plainly annoyed and others amused at the drone of the “cello buzz” coming from our table. Let us drop the curtain on this painful scene. Poor fellow 1 He is silent now among the great majority in the land from whence.no traveler returns.
Hats Off!—The Psychologist
One of the latest converts to the religion of voice development lives in London.
He spent more than the first fifty years of his life in the service of the pictorial arts and he has painted a great number of pictures which may rightly be described as works of art. But at a vocal recital in Wigmore Hall he had a revelation. Something within him showed him that the singer on the platform was “all wrong.” Her pose was artificial, her management of the voice was unnatural, her pronunciation was affected. In a flash the truth burst on him that the basis of the lady’s failure was psychological (blessed word!). He saw that what she needed was “to let herself go.” Anyone who can become as a little child, be natural and let himself go, will necessarily be a convincing artist. And of course a convincing artist need not pay any attention to vocal methods, for a “vocal method is only a help towards becoming convincing.” This fatuous argument appeared to satisfy the psycho-painto-voco-specialist, and he departed, strongly advising us to discard Lamperti and Garcia for the much more reliable Sully and James, who trained the mind which ruled the voice. Like most new converts he could stand no joking about his infallible method and was hurt when we asked if the great singers who had. gone before had let themselves go.
Enough Is as Good as a Feast
We might lengthen this article with descriptions of dog bark methods, lighted candle breath control, diaphragm exercises when lying flat on the back, shouting with a pillow over the mouth, and other odd means to a desired end, but see it expedient to stop. We assure our readers, however, that all we have related is true.
The only ornamentation is in the telling of the tale. The 'musical profession is overcrowded with bad teachers, particularly professed teachers of singing. But how can the evil be cured? We do not know. We doubt if legislation and legal examination would do any good. And, after all, the bitter school of experience has not prevented many ambitious and persistent singers from achieving fame and fortune.
After groping in the dark through trials and discouragement, the right way is found. Let Shakespeare put the finishing touch; “and then my state,
“Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.”
Training of a heavyweight ־boxer.”
your tongue stretched.”
“Shouting with a pillow over the mouth.”
it is absurd to think that the most natural musical instrument in the world requires the exercises and physical training of a heavyweight boxer.
Pianos Against the Stomach
A vocal teacher who had considerable reputation in his day was so abnormally devoted to diaphragmatic breathing that he developed the muscles of a blacksmith in his stomach. He used to put his back against the wall and get his pupils to wheel the grand piano tight against his abdomen. He then demonstrated the unrivalled superiority of his singing method by pushing the piano away from him with the muscles of his diaphragm.
Thereupon all the disciples would exclaim, “Wonderful, wonderful!” and go to their respective homes fired with new ambition to shove grand pianos about the room with their steel-spring stomachs.
The real tragedy came when the teacher with the tornado wind pressure began to sing.
He may have had the stomach of a roaring lion, but his voice was that of a cooing dove. And the extraordinary part of the whole
business was that all his pupils, male and female, sang with the gentleness of a purring cat. Several of his pupils afterwards learned to sing, but not by his piano moving methods, which might be good for indigestion but not for art.
Singing Like a Jew’s Harp
A tenor, whose name was a household word in England and America some twenty years ago, told us that he once wasted many precious hours learning what his instructor called “the ripple.” It consisted of a commingled hum and whistle, which made a mellifluous buzz. But the method was impracticable because the singer could not pronounce a word when he turned himself into a human Jew’s harp.
Get Your Tongue Stretched
One teacher whose name like Poe’s heroine, shall be nameless evermore, had an original method for gaining control of the tongue. He took hold of the unruly member with a rag in his hand and drew it forcibly forwards and downwards. The ensuing conversation of the hapless pupil resembled the chattering of the village idiot. Did lies in not Demosthenes put pebbles in his mouth and declaim amid the roaring of the tempestuous waves in order to overcome defects of speech? Why, then, should not a more enlightened voice builder attack these defects by tugging at the roots of the tongue itself?
Scraping the Throat
A famous baritone, who interpreted Schubert, Schumann and Brahms to his own piano accompaniment when the present generation of . music lovers was in its cradle, used to insist on the cultivation of the “fine little muscles in the throat.” He was always busy contracting something in his neck, presumably muscles, and he drew his lower jaw almost inside his collar when he began to sing. Whether his method was right or wrong is not for us to say, but we know that the actual tone he emitted was hard and scrapy. Only the man’s high musical intelligence and personal magnetism made him a success before the public. Therefore, students thus endowed may safely cultivate the fine little muscles in the throat.
Nasal Tones and Religion
We heard a teacher tell his pupils that they must always “sing in the nose.” Another teacher assured us that each
tone “must be felt by the top of the head.” We have never attempted to perform either of the anatomical feats, but we presume they can be done if the teachers say so. Some years ago an enthusiastic voice builder informed us that he was in despair of ever learning how to sing until he took up occultism. The deeper he went into the occult the more he saw the light. We remember, too, a delicate young man, long since dead, who said that all the singing method he ever had he
“G e t
“Scraping. the throat."
OT many years ago a musical investigator with a statistical mind estimated that of all the vocal students who went to Paris only one-fifth of one per cent, (two out of 1,000) became eminent. Our first impulse was to condemn Paris as a city of bad vocal methods. Maturer reflection, however, makes us believe that one-fifth of one per cent, is a high average of efficiency. What becomes of the tens of thousands of would-be vocalists who coo and bawl and moo and drawl and ah! and la! and ha! and “me” and “may” and chortle and gurgle and “hem” and “um” and snort and bark and cluck and blob and bleat and whinney and neigh and growl and grunt, and occasionally sing, in every city, town and village, from the mists of Maine to the blazing sunshine of California? Not one-fifth of one per cent, of them reaches eminence. Why?
Few Really Great Singers
In the first place, many of them were never intended by nature to uplift their fellow human beings with the joys of beautiful singing. They all have voices, of a sort, but they are not always endowed with musical intelligence, sometimes not even with common sense. Secondly, they frequently get no encouragement and help from their environment. They cannot achieve eminence, like the poet’s well known flower that was born to blush unseen, if they must waste, perforce, their sweetness on the desert air. Health and wealth must also play their parts in the career of a vocalist. But the enemy who lies in wait for every singer is the specialist with a peculiar and infallible method. There are thousands of them, male and female.
They exist in every country under heaven.
Some moralists see in them a beneficent check sent by Providence divine to prevent the human species from becoming eminent vocalists, one and all. Others, of a more practical turn of mind, consider them the pests of the young singer, using his ignorance and ambition as a means for getting money for themselves.
Terribly in Earnest
The truth is, however, that many, if not most, of these so-called voice specialists are perfectly sincere. They believe implicitly in their peculiar panacea for the sins of the vocal world. The woman who told us she ought to know how to teach singing “because she had lost her voice learning to sing” was as true to her own convictions as any of the sixteenth century martyrs were when condemned to “turn or burn.” No doubt the reformed drunkard can speak from experience of the woes that lurk in alcohol, but we hardly think it wise for vocal students to lose their voices learning to sing. Never having had any-singing voice to lose, however, we may be wrong. Perhaps some of the unpleasant singers we sometimes hear are objectionable only because they did not study long enough to lose their voices entirely. We recommend to them a post graduate course. Every town has a supply of voice breakers who will complete the wreck, if the student is conscientious.
Finding the Best Teachers
The selection of the right teacher is no laughing matter for the student. Perhaps there is nothing for the student to do but to keep on trying until he finds the teacher he needs. Fortunately, there are many good teachers as well as bad, although we believe the bad are in excess of the good. We know that every vocal teacher has pupils who came to him from another teacher, and a great part of his work consists in trying to undo what the former teacher
did. We knew a singer who had to give up his singing lessons because the doctor warned him of heart disease if he continued his lessons. The singer was healthy enough when he gave up the violent exercises for the diaphragm his teacher had shown him. We knew also a perfectly healthy, strong, active young woman, who could play tennis for hours without undue fatigue, but could not stand the strain of the exercises her vocal instructor gave her. Sometimes she nearly fainted, and at all times she was completely exhausted after her lessons. We cannot believe that such a method is necessary or desirable. We know that the cramped and unnatural position required of the student of the violin is tiring for the beginner. But
enemy who wait.”
“The
(AINTWÈN
VQOT FUN ?
“Sing or burn."