III
STUDY IN TONE-COLOR
And now we must turn to our last point of discussion, tone-color. What is the nature of this element of our vocabulary—this Klangfarbe, this Timbre? Upon what does it depend? You will say, "It is a property of the voice depending upon the form of the vibrations which produce the tone." True! And physiologically the form of the vibrations depends upon the condition of the entire vocal apparatus. Tone-color, then, is a modulation of resonance. But what concerns us is the fact that it is an emotional modulation of resonance. What concerns us is the fact that, as a change of thought instantly registers itself in a change of pitch, so a change of emotion instantly produces a change in the color of the tone—if the voice is a free instrument. And so, as before, I want you not to think of the physiological aspect, but to yield to the emotion, noting the character of the resultant tone, regardless of what has happened in the larynx to produce that result.
As Browning affords us the best material for our study in change of pitch, so the poems of Sidney Lanier offer to the voice the richest field for exercise in tone-color. Musician and poet in one, Lanier's peculiar charm lies in his unerring choice of words, which suggest in their sound, when rightly voiced, the atmosphere of the scene he is painting. Lanier uses words as Corot uses colors. This gives the voice its opportunity to bring out by subtle variations in timbre the variations in light and shade of an atmosphere. To read aloud, sympathetically, once a day, Lanier's The Symphony is the best possible way to develop simultaneously all the elements of a vocal vocabulary. We shall use this poem to-day as a text for our study in tone-color. Let us omit the message of the violins and heavier strings, and take the passage beginning with the interlude upon which the flute-voice breaks:
But presently
A velvet flute-note fell down pleasantly
Upon the bosom of that harmony,
And sailed and sailed incessantly,
As if a petal from a wild rose blown
Had fluttered down upon that pool of tone
And boatwise dropped o' the convex side
And floated down the glassy tide
And clarified and glorified
The solemn spaces where the shadows bide.
From the warm concave of that fluted note
Somewhat, half song, half odor, forth did float,
As if a rose might somehow be a throat; ...
What an ideal for tone-color! Dare we think to make it ours? We must. We must adopt it with confidence of attainment. Let me quote a little further:
When Nature from her far-off glen
Flutes her soft messages to men,
The flute can say them o'er again;
Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone,
Breathes through life's strident polyphone
The flute-voice in the world of tone.
Read this passage aloud as a mere statement of fact, employing a matter-of-fact tone. Gray in color, is it not? Now let your voice take the color Lanier has blended for you. Let your tone, like a thing "half song, half odor," float forth on these words and linger as only a perfume can about the thought. Now let the tone change in color to clarify and glorify the following message from the flute:[13]
Sweet friends,
Man's love ascends
To finer and diviner ends
Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends.
I cannot, for lack of space, reprint the whole flute message, but you will get the poem, if you have it not, and voice every word of it, I am sure. Here are some of the most telling lines for our present purpose:
I speak for each no-tongued tree
That, spring by spring, doth nobler be,
And dumbly and most wistfully
His mighty prayerful arms outspreads
Above men's oft-unheeding heads,
And his big blessing downward sheds.
I speak for all-shaped blooms and leaves,
Lichens on stones and moss on eaves,
Grasses and grains in ranks and sheaves;
Broad-fronded ferns and keen-leaved canes,
And briery mazes bounding lanes,
And marsh-plants, thirsty-cupped for rains,
And milky stems and sugary veins;
For every long-armed woman-vine
That round a piteous tree doth twine;
For passionate odors, and divine
Pistils, and petals crystalline;
· · · · ·
All tree-sounds, rustlings of pine-cones,
Wind-sighings, doves' melodious moans,
And night's unearthly undertones;
All placid lakes and waveless deeps,
All cool reposing mountain-steeps,
Vale-calms and tranquil lotos-sleeps;—
Yea, all fair forms, and sounds, and lights,
And warmths, and mysteries, and mights,
Of Nature's utmost depths and heights,
—These doth my timid tongue present,
Their mouthpiece and leal instrument
And servant, all love-eloquent.
You see, to voice this message a mood born of all the "warmths and mysteries and mights of Nature's utmost depths and heights" must take possession of you, and you must yield your instrument to the expression of that mood. Then watch, watch, watch the color of the tone change as the voice, starting with the clear flute-note, follows sympathetically the varying phases of Nature's face which the poet has so sympathetically painted. And now, after a "thrilling calm," the flute yields its place to a sister instrument, and the tone must change its timbre to the reed note of the clarionet. In the "melting" message of that instrument we find two passages which afford the voice chance for a most vivid contrast in color. Beginning with the line, "Now comes a suitor with sharp, prying eye," read the two descriptions which follow, lending your voice to the atmosphere of each:
... Here, you Lady, if you'll sell I'll buy:
Come, heart for heart—a trade? What! weeping? why?
Shame on such wooer's dapper mercery!
I would my lover kneeling at my feet
In humble manliness should cry, O sweet!
I know not if thy heart my heart will greet:
I ask not if thy love my love can meet:
Whate'er thy worshipful soft tongue shall say,
I'll kiss thine answer, be it yea or nay:
I do but know I love thee, and I pray
To be thy knight until my dying day.
The first two lines, which set forth a suit in terms of trade, demand a hard, calculating tone, suggestive of large silver dollars. Call this color dull steel gray. This tone flashes out for a moment in the white indignation of the third line, softens and warms with the next two lines, then grows and glows until it reaches a crimson radiance in the last two lines. Try it!
And now, with "heartsome voice of mellow scorn," let us sound the message of the "bold straightforward horn."
"Now comfort thee," said he,
"Fair Lady.
For God shall right thy grievous wrong,
And man shall sing thee a true-love song,
Voiced in act his whole life long,
Yea, all thy sweet life long,
Fair Lady.
Where's he that craftily hath said.
The day of chivalry is dead?
I'll prove that lie upon his head,
Or I will die instead,
Fair Lady.
· · · · ·
Now by each knight that e'er hath prayed
To fight like a man and love like a maid,
Since Pembroke's life as Pembroke's blade,
I' the scabbard, death was laid,
I dare avouch my faith is bright
That God doth right and God hath might.
Nor time hath changed His hair to white,
Nor His dear love to spite,
Fair Lady.
I doubt no doubts: I strive, and shrive my clay,
And fight my fight in the patient modern way
For true love and for thee—ah me! and pray
To be thy knight until my dying day,
Fair Lady."
Made end that knightly horn, and spurred away,
Into the thick of the melodious fray.
Remember your key is set for you,—the color of the tone is plainly chosen for you by Mr. Lanier. Not red nor yellow, but a blending of the two. Orange, is it not? Will not an orange tone give us the feel of heartsome confidence behind and through the mellow scorn of the knight's message? Try it! Let the two primary colors, red and yellow, enter in varying degrees according to, or following, the emotional variation in the thought, as the knight or the lover dominates in the message. In the first seven lines the tone glows with the love radiance and the orange deepens toward red. With the next five lines the lover yields to the knight, and the tone flashes forth a golden, keen-edged sword. With the thirteenth line the tone begins in the orange on "Now by each knight that e'er hath prayed," flashes into yellow in "to fight like a man," softens and deepens toward red in "and love like a maid," and returns to the orange to finish the horn motif.
Next in this poem which affords such a wonderful study for tone-color we have the hautboy's message. The color is mixed and laid on the palette ready for use as before, with the introductory lines:
And then the hautboy played and smiled,
And sang like any large-eyed Child,
Cool-hearted and all undefiled.
Don't let the words large-eyed Child mislead you. Don't, I beseech you, make the mistake of adopting the "Little Orphan Annie" tone with which the "elocutionist" too often insults the pure treble of a child's "undefiled" instrument. That is the keynote to us for our choice of color—"cool-hearted and all undefiled." Almost a white tone, is it not? With a little of the blue of the June sky? Try it. Let the blue be visibly present in the first three lines:
"Huge Trade!" he said,
"Would thou wouldst lift me on thy head
And run where'er my finger led!"
turning to pure white in the next three lines:
Once said a Man—and wise was He—
Never shalt thou the heavens see
Save as a little child thou be.
The last voice comes from the "ancient wise bassoons." Again there is danger. Do not, oh! do not fall afoul of the conventional old man's quavering tone. There is nothing conventional about these "weird, gray-beard old harpers sitting on the high sea-dunes," chanting runes. The last words of these introductory lines safeguard us—"chanted runes." There is only one color of tone in which to chant runes. Gray, is it not? Yes, but a silver gray, not the steel gray of the clarionet when she became for the moment a commercial lover. Then in the silver-gray tone of the philosopher, voice this last motif:
Bright-waved gain, gray-waved loss,
The sea of all doth lash and toss,
One wave forward and one across:
But now 'twas trough, now 'tis crest,
And worst doth foam and flash to best,
And curst to blest.
The importance of a right use of tone-color in vocal interpretation was impressed upon a Browning class last winter. We were reading the Dramatic Lyrics. The poem for the hour was Meeting at Night. The tone with which the first student attacked this exquisite love-lyric was so businesslike, so matter of fact, so utterly out of key, that we who listened saw not the lover hastening to his beloved, but a real-estate agent "out to buy" a farm. The "gray sea, the long black land, the yellow half-moon large and low, the startled little waves that creep in fiery ringlets from their sleep, the pushing prow of the boat quenched in the slushy sand, the warm, sea-scented beach, and the three fields" all assumed a merely commercial value. They were interesting exactly as would be a catalogue of properties in a deed of real estate. If you are not a very intense member of a Browning society you will, I think, enjoy the test of tone-color involved in reading this poem from the contrasted standpoints of the business man and the lover. Of course, in the first instance you must stop where I, in desperation, stopped the student on the words, "a farm appears." For I defy any one to read the last two lines in a gray, matter-of-fact tone.
As was the case in our consideration of inflection, so in this study of tone-color there is an embarrassment of rich material for the exercise of this element. Lanier's Sunrise and Corn; Browning's prologue to The Two Poets of Croisic, with a vivid contrast of color in each verse; Swinburne's almost every line; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson—but why enumerate? All the colorists among the poets will reward your search of a text for the development of timbre.
For a final brief study of the three elements we aim to acquire, with especial emphasis in thought upon the last one, let us take this prologue to The Two Poets of Croisic, with its color-contrast in each verse:
Such a starved bank of moss
Till that May morn,
Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born!
Sky—what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
Splendid, a star!
World—how it walled about
Life with disgrace
Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face
The vocal treatment of the first two verses will be very much alike. The voice starts in minor key, a gray monotone, in harmony with the absence of color in the bare bank of dull moss. The inflection of the word "starved" must emphasize the grayness. It must be a dull push of the tone on the first syllable, with little, if any, lift above the level of the low pitch on which the whole line is spoken. With a swift, salient, rising inflection on the opening word of the second line, an inflection which creates expectancy of change, the voice lifts the thought out of the minor into the major key. I must call your attention to the vital significance of the use of pause at this point by simply asking you to indulge in it. Stop after uttering the word till and study the effect of the pause. It is the pause quite as much as the inflection, you see, which induces the expectant attitude you desire to create in the mind of your auditor. With the next three words, "that May morn," the tone takes on a bit of the warmth of early summer. A lingering cadence on the word "May" will help the suggestion. With the third line the voice begins to shine. I know no other way to express it. The inflections are swift and straight, but not staccato, because they must suggest a growth, not a burst of color. The tone on which the words are borne must be continuous. It must not be broken off definitely with each word, as is to prove most effective, we shall find, in handling the third line of the second verse. The fourth line brings the full, glowing, radiant tone on the first word, "violets." This tone must be held in full volume on the last two words. The law for beautiful speech must be observed here. (But where should it not be observed?) Let us recall the law, "Beautiful speech depends upon openness of vowels and definiteness of consonants." The vowels give volume to a word, the consonants form. Slur your consonants and squeeze your vowels in the three words of this line, "Violets were born," and what becomes of this miracle of spring? The voicing of the second verse is very like that of the first. The opening line demands the same gray monotone. But the three words, "sky," "scowl," and "cloud," if clear-cut in utterance, as they should be, will break the level of the line more than the single word "starved" in the first line of the first verse can do, or was meant to do. There is the same swift lift of the voice in the opening word of the second line, the same change to the major key, the same growing glow in the tone on the third line, and the same radiant outburst of color sustained through the last line. The only difference lies in the suffusion of radiance in the tone to suggest the coming of color to the bank, in the first verse, and the outburst of radiance to suggest the sudden splitting of the clouds and the star's swift birth, in the second verse. With the emotional change of thought in the last verse, from a travail and birth in nature to a human soul's struggle and rebirth, the deepening color which creeps into the tone indicates the entrance of personal passion. The key does not change. The inflections are still and straight. The tone simply deepens and glows in the last two lines, as a prayerful ecstasy possesses the one who reads.