It usually happens that students change teachers about the time the voice has become unmanageably stiff. In this condition the student, of course, sings rather badly. A marked improvement in the singing generally results from the change of teachers. This is easy to understand because the new teacher devotes his first efforts to relaxing the stiffened throat. Later on this improvement is very likely to be lost, for the second teacher has nothing more of a positive nature to offer than the first.
Vocal teachers in general seem to be aware of the fact that mechanical instruction causes the student's throat to stiffen. A much-debated question is whether "local effort" is needed to bring about the correct vocal action. The term local effort is used to describe the direct innervation of the throat muscles. A logical application of the mechanical idea absolutely demands the use of local effort. This is the main argument of the local-effort teachers.
Those teachers who discountenance local effort have only their own experience to guide them. They simply know that local effort results in throat stiffness. Yet these teachers have nothing to offer in place of the mechanical management of the vocal organs. Even though aware of the evil results of local effort, they yet know of no other means of imparting the correct vocal action. The weakness of the position of these teachers is well summed up by a writer in Werner's Magazine for June, 1899: "To teach without local effort or local thought is to teach in the dark. Every exponent of the non-local-effort theory contradicts his theory every time he tells of it." To that extent this writer states the case correctly. Every modern vocal teacher believes that the voice must be consciously guided in its muscular operations. Until this erroneous belief is abandoned it is idle for a teacher to decry the use of local effort.
[CHAPTER IV]
THE TRUE MEANING OF VOCAL TRAINING
In all scientific treatises on the voice it is assumed that the voice has some specifically correct mode of operation. Training the voice is supposed to involve the leading of the vocal organs to abandon their natural and instinctive manner of operating, and to adopt some other form of activity. Further, the assumption is made that the student of singing must cause the vocal organs to adopt a supposedly correct manner of operating by paying direct attention to the mechanical movements of tone-production. Both these assumptions are utterly mistaken. On scientific analysis no difference is seen between the right and the wrong vocal action, such as is assumed in the accepted Vocal Science. Psychological principles do not countenance the idea of mechanical vocal management.
Yet the fact remains, as a matter of empirical observation, that there is a marked difference between the natural voice and the correctly trained voice. What change takes place in the voice as a result of correct training?
Singing is a natural function of the vocal organs. Learning to sing artistically does not involve a departure from natural and instinctive processes. The training of the voice consists of the acquirement of skill in the use of the vocal organs, and of nothing more.
Under normal conditions the vocal organs instinctively adjust themselves, by performing the necessary muscular contractions, to fulfill the demands of the ear. In order that a perfect musical tone be produced it is necessary in the first place that the ear be keen and well trained; only such an ear can know the exact sound of a perfect tone, and so demand it of the voice. Second, the vocal organs must make repeated efforts to produce the perfect tone, each response approaching nearer to the mentally-conceived tone. Two elements are therefore involved in the training of the voice; first, the cultivation of the sense of hearing; second, the acquirement of skill in the use of the voice by the actual practice of singing.