VI
SINGING AS AN ART
No artist can be graceful, imaginative, or original, unless he be truthful.
Ruskin. Modern Painters.
“Art is a transfer of feeling” said Tolstoy. While this applies to art in general it has a particular application to the art of singing. The material of the singer’s art is feeling. By means of the imagination he evokes within himself feelings he has experienced and through the medium of his voice he transfers these feelings to others. By his ability to reconstruct moods, feelings and emotions within himself and express them through his voice, the singer sways multitudes, plays upon them, carries them whithersoever he will from the depths of sorrow to the heights of exaltation. His direct and constant aim is to make his hearers feel, and feel deeply. As a medium for the transfer of feeling the human voice far transcends all others. Since the beginning of the human race the voice has been the means by which it has most completely revealed itself, but the art is not in the voice, but in the feeling transferred. It is the same whether the medium be the voice, painting, sculpture, poetry or a musical instrument. We speak of a painting as being a great work of art, but the art is not in the painting, the art is the feeling of beauty which the painting awakes in the observer. When we listen to an orchestra the music is what we feel. Said Walt Whitman: “Music is what awakes within us when we are reminded by the instruments.”
Nothing exists separate from cognition. Real art therefore consists of pure feeling rather than of material objects. If the singer succeeds in transferring his feelings to others he is an artist, this regardless of whether his voice is great or small. Voice alone does not constitute an artist. One must have something to give. Schumann said: “The reason the nightingale sings love songs and the lap dog barks is because the soul of the nightingale is filled with love and that of the lap dog with bark.” It will be apparent therefore, that the study of the art of singing should devote itself to developing in the singer the best elements of his nature—all that is good, pure and elevating. We have no right to transfer to others any feeling that is impure or unwholesome. The technic of an art is of small moment compared with its subject matter. An unworthy poem cannot be purified by setting it to music no matter how beautiful the music may be.
THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION
I fancy there is nothing more intangible to most people than the term “phrasing.” I have asked a great many students to give me the principles of phrasing, but as yet I have seen none who could do it, and yet all singers, from the youngest to the oldest must make some use of these principles every time they sing. Now a thing in such general use should be, and is, subject to analysis.
All of the rules of phrasing, like the rules of composition, grow out of what sounds well. Beauty and ugliness are matters of mental correspondence. In music a thing to be beautiful must satisfy a mental demand, and this demand is one’s taste. The sense of fitness must obtain. When the singer interprets a song the demand of the listener is that he shall do well what he undertakes to do: that he shall portray whatever phase of life the song contains, accurately, definitely, that he shall have a definite intent and purpose, that he shall be in the mood of the song. The singer must not portray one mood with his face, another with his voice, while the poem suggests still a third. He must avoid incongruity. All things must work together. There must be therefore, the evidence of intelligent design in every word and phrase.