The Head Voice and Other Problems: Practical Talks on Singing

by D. A. Clippinger

This is a sample of teaching by direct control. It is not overdrawn. It is a chapter from real life, and I was the victim.

You will have observed that this lesson was devoted to teaching the student how to do certain things with the vocal mechanism. The real thing, the tone, the result at which all teaching should aim was placed in the background. It was equivalent to trying to teach him to do something but not letting him know what. It was training the body, not the mind, and the result was what invariably happens when this plan is followed.

In the lesson given above no attempt was made to give the student a correct mental picture of a tone, and yet this is the most important thing for him to learn, for he never will sing a pure tone until he has a definite mental picture of it. A tone is something to hear and the singer himself must hear it before he can sing it.

Not one of the suggestions made to this student could be of any possible benefit to him at the time. Not even the sensation of feeling the tone in the head can be relied upon, for physical sensations are altogether uncertain and unreliable. As I have observed in numberless instances, there may be a sensation in the head when there are disagreeable elements in the tone. If the ear of the teacher does not tell him when the tone is good and when it is bad he is hopeless. If his ear is reliable, why resort to a physical sensation as a means of deciding? In the properly produced voice there is a feeling of vibration in the head cavities, especially in the upper part of the voice, but that alone is not a guaranty of good tone.

This teaching from the standpoint of sensation and direct control will never produce a great singer so long as man inhabits a body. It is working from the wrong end of the proposition. Control of the mechanism is a very simple matter when the mental concept is formed. It is then only a question of learning how to relax, how to free the mechanism of tension, and the response becomes automatic.

Is there no way out of this maze of mechanical uncertainties? There is. Is voice culture a sort of catch-as-catch-can with the probabilities a hundred to one against success? It is not. Is singing a lost art? It is not. Let us get away from fad, fancy and formula and see the thing as it is. The problem is psychologic rather than physiologic. The fact that one may learn all that can be known about physiology and still know nothing whatever about voice training should awaken us to its uselessness.

Man is a mental entity. When I speak to a student it is his mind that hears, not his body. It is his mind that acts. It is his mind that originates and controls action. Therefore it is his mind that must be trained.

Action is not in the body. In fact, the body as matter has no sensation. Remove mind from the body and it does not feel. It is the mind that feels. If you believe that the body feels you must be prepared to explain where in the process of digestion and assimilation the beefsteak and potato you ate for dinner become conscious, because to feel they must be conscious. We know that the fluids and solids composing the body have no sensation when they are taken into the body, nor do they ever become sentient. Therefore the body of itself has no initiative, no action, no control. All of these are the functions of mind, hence the incongruity of attempting to solve a problem which is altogether psychological, which demands qualities of mind, habits of mind, mental concepts of a particular kind and quality, by a process of manipulation of the organ through which mind expresses itself, making the training of the mind a secondary matter; and then absurdly calling it scientific.

In every form of activity two things are involved: first, the idea: second, its expression. It must be apparent then, that the quality of the thing expressed will be governed by the quality of the idea. Or, to put it in another way: In the activity of art two things are involved—subject-matter and technic. The subject-matter, the substance of art, is mental. Technic is gaining such control of the medium that the subject-matter, or idea, may be fully and perfectly expressed. Ideas are the only substantial things in the universe, and that there is a difference in the quality of ideas need not be argued. Two men of the same avoirdupois may be walking side by side on the street, but one of them may be a genius and the other a hod carrier.

I have dwelt at some length on this because I wish to show where the training of a singer must begin, and that when we understand the real nature of the problem its solution becomes simple.