LEARNING TO FREE THE TONE
We have worked, so far, for support of tone. We must now free the supported tone, by freeing the channel for the emission of the breath as it is converted into tone and moulded into speech. We shall find that in learning to support the tone we have gone far toward securing that freedom; but the habit of years is not easily overcome, and every time you have spoken without proper support of breath you have forced the tone from the throat, by tightening the muscles and closing the channel, thus making conditions which must now be reformed by steady, patient effort. Yet it is not effort I want from you now; it is lack of effort. It is passivity; it is surrender. I want you to relax all the muscles which govern the organs concerned in converting the breath into tone and moulding the tone into speech, all the muscles controlling the throat and mouth, including the lips and jaw. I want utter passivity of the parts from the point where the column of breath strikes the vocal cords to where, as tone, it is moulded into the word "No." Surrender to the desire to utter that word. Concentrate your thought on two things: the taking of the breath and the word it is to become. Now, lying down, or sitting easily, lazily, in a comfortable chair, or standing leaning against the wall, with closed eyes, surrender to the thought "No," and, taking a breath, speak. Still hard and unmusical you find? Yes, but I am sure not so hopelessly hard as before. What shall we do to relax the tense muscles, to release the throat and free the channel? At the risk of being written down a propagandist, in the ranks of the extreme dress-reformers, I shall say, first of all, take off those high, tight collars. Again, as with the corset, it is a case of a misfit rather than too tight a fit. If your collar is cut to fit, it need not be too high nor too tight for comfort, and it will still be becoming. You want it to cling to the neck and keep the line. Cut it to fit, and it will keep the line; then put in pieces of whalebone, if necessary, or resort to some of the many other devices now in vogue for keeping the soft collar erect, but don't choke yourself, either by fastening it too tight or cutting it too high. But how simple it would be if we could relax the tension by doffing our ill-fitting corsets and collars. Alas! the trouble is deeper seated than that.
It is an indisputable and most unfortunate fact that nervous tension registers itself more easily in the muscles about the mouth and throat than anywhere else. So, if we live as do even the children of to-day, under excitement, and so in a state of nervous tension, the habit of speaking with the channel only half open is quickly formed, and the voice becomes shrill and harsh. You have noticed that the more emphatic one grows in argument the higher and harder the voice becomes, and, incidentally, the less convincing the argument. This is true of all excitement; the nervous tension accompanying it constricts the throat, and the result is a closed channel. To learn instinctively to refer this tension for registration not to the throat, but to the diaphragm, is a part of vocal training. This can be easily accomplished with children, and the habit established of taking a deep breath under the influence of any emotion. This breath will cause the throat to open instead of shut, and the tone to grow full, deep, and round, instead of high and harsh. The full, deep, round tone will carry twice as far as the high, harsh, breathy one. The one deep breath resulting in the full, deep tone may—nay, will—often serve the same purpose as Tattycoram's "Count five-and-twenty," and save the angry retort.
It is useless to regret, on either ethical or aesthetic grounds, that we were not taught in childhood to take the deep breath and make the deep tone. But let us look to it that the voices and dispositions of our children are not allowed to suffer. Meanwhile, in correcting the fault in the use of our own instruments, we shall go far toward establishing the proper condition with the next generation, since the child is so mimetic that, to hear sweet, quiet, low tones about him will have more effect than much technical training in keeping his voice free and musical. In the same way, the child who hears good English spoken at home seems less dependent upon text-books in grammar and rhetoric to perfect his verbal expression than the child who is not so fortunate in this respect.
To insure the registration of nervous tension in the muscles controlling the diaphragm and not the throat—that is, to form the habit of breathing deeply when speaking under the influence of emotion, is our problem. The present fault in registration will be found to be different with each one of us, or, at least, will cause us "to flock together" according to the place of registration. Each must locate for himself his own difficulty, or go to a vocal specialist and have it located. The tension may be altogether in the muscles governing the throat, or it may be in those about the mouth. There is the resultant, breathy tone, the hard tone, the nasal tone, the guttural tone, the tone that issues from a set jaw or an unruly tongue. All mean tension of muscles somewhere, and must be met by relaxation of these muscles and the freeing of the channel. How to relax the throat shall be our initial point of attack. A suggestion made by my first teacher proved most helpful to me, a suggestion so simple that I did not for the moment take it seriously. "Think," she said, "how your throat feels just before you yawn." "Yes," I replied, irrelevantly, "and just after you have eaten a peppermint—that cool, delicious, open sensation." This impressed her as significant, but not so effective as her suggestion to me, which I felt to be true when I began to think of it seriously, and so, of course, to yawn furiously. Try it.
Think of the yawn. Close your eyes and feel how the deep breath with which the yawn begins (the need of which, indeed, caused it) opens the throat, relaxing all the muscles. Now, instead of yawning, speak. The result will be a good tone, simply because the condition for tone was right. The moment the yawn actually arrives, the condition is lost, the throat closes; but in that moment before the break into the yawn, the muscles about the throat relax and the channel opens, as the muscles controlling the diaphragm tighten and the deep breath is taken.
These, then, are the first exercises in the second step in vocal training. This step is called Freeing the Tone.
First.—Yawn, noting the sensation.
Second.—Just before the throat breaks into the yawn, stop, and, instead of carrying out the yawn, speak. Repeat this fifty times a day, or ten times, as often as you will. Only, keep at it. Take always a single full-voweled monosyllable; one, or four, or no, or love, or loop, or dove, etc.
We cannot, in a printed consideration, touch more in detail upon individual cases, but must confine ourselves to these simple exercises, which will, in general, be swiftly and effectively remedial.
But we must not stop with the throat, which is but part of the channel involved in the emission of breath as speech. There is the tense jaw to be reckoned with—the jaw set by nervous tension, the jaw which refuses to yield itself to the moulding of the tone into the beautiful open vowel and the clean-cut consonant which make our words so interesting to utter. It is the set jaw which, forcing the tone to squeeze itself out, causes it to sound thin and hard. Again, it is surrender and not effort I want. Just as I should try to secure the relaxation of your arm or hand by asking you to surrender it to me, drop it a dead weight at your side for me to lift as I choose, so now I ask you to surrender your lower jaw to yourself. Let it go.
Drop your head forward, resting your chin on your chest. Then raise your head, but not your chin. Let your mouth fall open. Assume for the moment that mark of the feeble-minded, the idiotic, the dropped-open mouth, just long enough to note the sensation. Place your fingers on either side of your head where the jaws conjoin, and open your mouth quickly and with intention. Note the action under your finger-tips. Now let the mouth fall open, by simply surrendering the lower jaw, and note this time the lack of action under your fingers, at the juncture of the jaws. It is this passive surrender which we must learn to make, if we find, on investigation, that we are speaking through a half-open mouth held fast by a set jaw. The set jaw resists and distorts the mould, and the beauty of the form of the word which flows from the mould is lost; the relaxed jaw yields to the moulding of the perfectly modeled word.
In practising this relaxation there is very little danger of going too far, since the set jaw is the indication of a tense habit of thought, of a high-strung temperament, and this habit of thought will never become, through the practise of an outward mechanical exercise, the slack habit of thought which is evidenced by the loose dropping of words from a too relaxed jaw—a habit which must be met by quite the opposite method of treatment. There are many exercises involved in vocal training which must be directed very carefully for a time before the student can be trusted to practise them alone; so I am confining myself in this, as in every step we take together, to the simple, fundamental, and at the same time perfectly safe ones.
To review those for relaxation of the lower jaw:
First.—Drop the head until the chin rests upon the breast. Raise the head, but not the lower jaw.
Second.—With eyes devoid of intelligence and the mouth dropped open, shake the head until you feel the weight of the lower jaw—until the lower jaw seems to hang loosely from the upper jaw and to be shaken by it, as your hand, when you shake it from the wrist, seems to be commanded by the arm, and to have no volition of its own.
Third.—Test your ability to surrender the jaw by placing your fingers on either side your head in front of the ears at the conjunction of the jaws, and first open your mouth with intention, noting the action; then think the word No, and surrender the jaw to the forming of the word, noting the action or absence of action again.
So much for the set jaw. Ten or fifteen minutes a day—yes, even five minutes a day of actual practice with the constant thought of surrender, will reward you. Try it.
And still the channel is not open. There remains that most unruly member, the tongue. Dora Duty Jones refers all faults of technique in speech to failure in the management of the tongue. Miss Jones bases her entire system upon the three words, "On the tongue," in Hamlet's injunction to the players: speak the speech ... trippingly on the tongue. That this organ plays a vital part in the presentation of speech is not to be questioned; that it is the chief actor may be disputed. But whether the tongue is to play a main or a minor part the training to which Miss Jones would subject it is most interesting, and The Technique of Speech[14] should belong to the library of every student of expression. The only danger of this training lies in that of making the tongue a self-conscious actor. What we require of the tongue is that it shall act as a free agent in modeling the perfect word. Many of the exercises given by Miss Jones can be safely attempted only after the preparatory freeing of the organ has been accomplished, but all of them will eventually repay investigation.
Meanwhile the following drill for freeing the tongue ought to develop the agility we desire:
First.—Combine l (which may be called the tongue's pet consonant) with ä and repeat the syllable la with constantly increasing speed to form the following groups: lä' ... lä lä lä' ... lä lä lä' ... lä' ... lä'.
Second.—Change the accent over the vowel and repeat the exercise until all the sounds of a are exhausted in combination with the l.
Third.—Change the vowel and repeat the exercise until all the vowels have been used in combination with l.
Fourth.—Change the consonant to d, then to t, then n, and repeat the exercise.
Fifth.—Follow these exercises on groups of syllables with work on groups of words of one syllable beginning with l, such as: late, lade, lane, lame; last, lack, lank, lapse, laugh; lean, least, leak, leap, lead, etc.
Remember, we are considering primarily speech-tone and not speech form, and that our aim in the exercise of the tongue is to keep it from interrupting the tone.
And now a word must be said as to the part the lips take in speech. It must be only a word, because here more than at any other point the work needs the careful supervision of a trained ear and trained eyes. Madame Ricardo yields to the lips control of the tongue, as she gives to the diaphragm control of the breath. I think she would make easily on the lips rather than "trippingly on the tongue" the controlling principle in tone and speech. I shall give you but one exercise:
Combine the speech process m with the vowel ē and let the tone explode easily on the lips in the repeated syllable, mē, mē, mē.