51
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April 20, 1922
Vocal Teacher and Coach
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Consultation by Appointment
Studio : 25 West 86th Street
NEW YORK CITY
Phone: 8107 Schuyler
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publishing house of renown was especially enthusiastic, and this was echoed by others.
In Plainfield, on April 24, Mr. Mills will be heard in a recital given by the Women’s Union Christian College of the Orient; April 31 a joint recital with Daniel Wolf, the
WALTER MILLS,
pianist, at the Hotel Ambassador, after which Mr. Mills will leave for a short tour through New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
delighted her audience with her beautiful voice and artistic interpretation. Miss Rygg, another Klibansky pupil, has been engaged to sing at the Zion Norwegian Lutheran church, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Mr. Klibansky will give another artist-pupils’ recital today, April 20, in Larchmont, N. Y. On April 10, he introduced Walter Preston and Sara Lee at a recital at the American Institute of Applied Music.
Zoellner Quartet Gives Radio Concert
Chamber music by Radio! Father Haydn would surely think the world had gone wrong if in his day he were told one could hear his quartets which were composed for the princely few and played by and for the aristocracy, that his quartets would be heard in homes and in concert halls 300 miles distant from where the actual playing was produced.
With a clarity that was unbelievable, the Zoellner Quartet gave a Radio K. S. D. program over the St. Louis Post-Dispatch sending station in the Post-Dispatch building, St. Louis, on March 25. The Post-Dispatch is one of the leading and progressive newspapers of that section of the country. It was a rainy and disagreeable night, but none of the hundreds of listeners got wet feet or the “flu” for they were safely in their own homes listening in on one of the best treats of the season—so the many new wireless Zoellner admirers said.
E. A. Gauss, of Springfield, Mo., some 200 miles distant, wirelessed in praising the program and asking for an encore which was promptly given. Towns and cities within a radius of 300 miles heard the concert. In St. Louis there are a great many home radio stations, which gave the concert a “wide” appreciative public.
It was the first radio concert that the Zoellner Quartet has given. The quartet makes many phonograph records and the Zoellners stated they were not required to sit so near the transmitter for the radio concert as they had been in record making.
Walter Mills at Players’ Club
Walter Mills, well known concert baritone, after a week’s rest at Atlantic City, is again busily engaged with the final end of the concert season now drawing to a close.
Mr. Mills has been heard this season in more than ninety concerts, with five engagements to come. His reception at the Players’ Club, where he appeared April 9, necessitated several encores ; on repeated request he rendered Oley Speaks’ “On the Road to Mandalay” and William Arms Fisher’s “Deep River.” Reinald Werrenrath, who was to have appeared at this concert, was prevented on account of sickness.
The many flattering remarks tendered the singer by well known musical and social leaders must have been gratifying to the young baritone. The head of a leading music
MUSICIANSHIP A PRIME NECESSITY IN VOCAL SUCCESS
Written for the Prospective Student of Voice
By George E. Shea
If the average prospective vocal student, about to knock at the studio door to commence voice lessons, paused, turned away, sought out—instead of a voice teacher—a real master of solfeggio, music theory and pianistic elements, and intensively and exclusively dug at these subjects for one to two years, it would mean a saving of twice that period in the time ultimately necessary to become ready for public singing.
The average vocal student discovers a voice, or—a magic casement opening in his or her brain—the urge to sing, between the sixteenth and twentieth years, or later, but possesses no reasoned knowledge of music—its notation, theory, and rhythms—and has, at best, an undeveloped musical memory; those students who can read music and have some pianistic acquirement are welcome indeed to the singing teacher. This total unpreparedness for the practical business of learning to sing is so general as to menace disaster to our national hopes of good vocalism.
When a voice teacher, knowing his business, finds he must give three years to thrust a musically ignorant pupil forward for only a year's advance, it is positively disheartening. The simplest vocal exercise must be repeated ten times to be understood and ten more before it is learned—if so soon.
One meets vaudeville and cabaret “professionals” with a meager, threadbare and hobbling repertory, who do not know one note from another, and who haunt the agencies for a rare engagement, and one growls savagely at them : “For your own salvation go back to school and become■ a musician !” For such, a dotted eighth is a hieroglyphic, and a two-against-three group is a mystery of higher mathematics. And if the aspirant cannot analyze a 6-8 measure, how can he or she master the simplest ballad, let alone a page of Ravel or any of ^he moderns? And so the presence in the market place of singers who, the organist complains, are lost when confronted with an unknown anthem !
The effort of inculcating the conception of beautiful voice-tone and of fostering its production is an arduous one; complicate this with the musical ignorance of the pupil, and the job is a killing one. But what are we going to do about it? Voice comes around eighteen to musical ignoramuses. One big hope lies in public school and high school credits for music study.
In. many cases the problem is further complicated by the lack of money. Once the singing teacher is paid, the pupil cannot or will not spend anything for “just music lessons.”
When you reflect that learning to sing a song or a vocalize amounts primarily to learning to time properly the inbreath preceding the attack of each phrase, the immense importance for a singer of being familiar with musical notation, rhythms, and pulses, is apparent. Conversely, if the singer cannot properly time the inbreath preceding the 'attack, he is heavily handicapped : either the breath is taken too soon and must be held too long, or, as usually happens, it is taken too late and hurriedly—both ways, the tone and the interprétation suffer.
Without accurate timing, authority in the attack, that trump card in all musical performance, is unattainable to the indifferent musician, who, no matter how remarkably his purely instrumental fluency, can never be more than an amateur. This is also true of the release of tones. Furthermore, the properly timed breath alone permits that deliberate total vocal adjustment which creates confidence and confers authority.
The same keen acquired knowledge of note and rhythmic values makes possible those niceties of expressive diction where the prolonged preparation of an initial consonant gives emotional or aesthetic accent to the text and heightens the effect of the musical phrase while not obstructing its general flow. The musicianly sense of time values and proportions must be carried into the execution of all the ornaments of the phrase: appoggiatura, acciaccatura, grup-petto, and the balanced progression of an accelerando or a ritardando ; and where is appreciation of relative time values more essential than in the ultimate secret of legato singing—the prolonging of each vowel, coupled with such deft articulation as not to retard the music’s delivery?
Only the singer who is an excellent musician can become a great singer, and only a minority of singers ever do become excellent musicians after they begin to study voice.
The teacher of singing—needing many, many qualities and acquirements—must be an unalterable optimist ; for when the tyro appears, lacking all save a body and an inchoate vocal range, having no delicacy of musical perception, ignorant in fact of the A B C of the art, but eager to. and confident of scaling the heights of vocal fame, the teacher contemplates him with resigned indulgence and says nothing, but thinks unprintable things !
Student : In the name of your high hopes ! First become a musician ! and then, if you have the requisite physical endowment, your subsequent progress to the.singer’s reward will be rapid and joyful, if not meteoric.
Numerous Engagements for Klibansky Pupils
Sergei Klibansky announces many new engagements for his pupils as follows:
Lottice Howell gave a successful recital in Tarrytown, April 5; she also was a soloist at the Westinghouse Radio Station in Newark, N. J., April 3, and at the Sheridan Theater in New York during the week of March 27; early this month she left for a southern tour. Elsie Duffield has been engaged as soloist of the Community Church in New York. Gladys Davey has been engaged as a vocal instructor at the Drew Institute, Carmel, N. Y. Virginia Rea has been engaged for a concert in St. Louis with the Schubert Club, May 15. Myrtle Weed was soloist at the Metropolitan Study Club on April 3. Grace Hardy has been engaged as instructor at Mrs. White’s Camp, Cape Cod, Mass. Katherine Mortimer Smith was most successful at the musical show, “Hello Girl,” given March 30 at the Alvien School, New York. Elizabeth Carpenter gave a song recital in the Wesleyan Chapel, Macon, Ga., where she
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W estern Tour and wit h the Cornish School until May, Seattle, Wash.
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BOYD WELLS
B ARITO INI E
TEACHER OE VOICE
Available for Concerts, Recitals and Oratorio Studio: Metropolitan Building:	Orange, N. J.
N. Y. Branch: 105 West 130th Street
Wilson LAMB
OSCAR S EAGLE, Baritone
Now Teaching in New York City
STUDIO : 131 RIVERSIDE DRIVE
Applications may be sent to ISABELLE STRANAHAN, Secretary, at the above address
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16 W. 36th St.. New York Chickering Piano
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