We are incomprehensible and mysterious beings. We do not know whence we come nor whither we go; we do not know what agencies guide and sustain us—our end is a tragic one. While the soles of our feet closely adhere to the ground, our heads are in touch with the most distant stars. We exercise faculties to perfection whose origin and mode of operation are unalterably hidden from our knowledge. We possess gifts and talents which raise us above the plane of our ordinary existence and inspire us with the belief that we are related to the divinity, are part of the divinity. It has ever been man's aim to penetrate this darkness, to learn to comprehend himself. The vocation of the singer is one to which this knowledge is indispensable. In the fulness of his organization endowed by nature with a divine gift, the singer's aim and desire is to retain and perfect this gift.
The birds sing their same individual song throughout their career. Man, however, sings the song of his soul; a song as endless and as varied as his thoughts. Song with him is not a gift alone, but its exercise is a study, an art. He must sing knowingly; he must ascertain the source of his song and the reason why certain causes produce certain results. Hence the necessity for a science of the voice.
The knowledge of the exercise of our faculties is dependent on the knowledge of life and on that of the spirit, without whose aid no transaction of life of any kind ever takes place. Despairing of his ability to penetrate into the realms of the spirit, aspiring man has ever resorted to that which was next at his command—matter. Hence the effort throughout all of man's history to reach the soul by way of the body. But body and mind, in alliance, have ever succeeded in frustrating these efforts; in keeping the secret of their duality and mutuality intact from the gaze of man. Yet singers are determined to find out something in relation to the voice at least. Finding that we cannot penetrate into the relation existing between mind and matter, the effort is renewed in the most persistent manner to explain the life and the spirit, whose essence and outcome is the voice, by examining into the relation of matter to matter.
Our professor, having discarded the assistance of life and the spirit, dabbles in matter pure and undefiled. This process our young students are invited to attend. They carry their youth and their talent, their high hopes and aspirations, into the dissecting-room, where the spirit of the voice is supposed to reveal itself among the ghastliest spectacles. If a person of ordinary good sense, but not acquainted with these subjects, were to attend a lecture on the physiology of the voice and then attend a singing-lesson based upon the knowledge thus attained, he would be apt to remark: "Can this performance possibly be meant to be in good faith? Is not this man taking advantage of the credulity of this woman, who is giving him her hard-earned money, but to find before long that she has been beggared, not only in purse, but in voice and spirit as well; that she has not been benefited in any sense, but sadly robbed and betrayed?"
The persistency with which the modern scientist attempts to hammer a voice out of the larynx and surrounding material tissues and other physical agencies is a cardinal sin against the holy "spirit." When he uses this supposed knowledge for coining it into money at the expense of trusting and aspiring singers, he commits a malpractice, for which some day he will have to go to the penitentiary of his own conscience; that is, if he is in possession of any. "Vocal bands, mucous membranes, tissues, ligaments, muscles, hollow spaces, air-pressure,"—these are the factors productive of the voice divine; matter, nought but matter; not a spark of the divine afflatus, not a spark even of life.
Journals devoted to the voice are full of these things. I will quote but a single instance. At the Music Teachers' National Convention, held in New York, in June, 1898, a sensation was created by Dr. Frank E. Miller (see Werner's Magazine for August, 1898, page 490) saying:
"In other words, I wish to say that the action of the cavities or hollow spaces is anterior and prior to the action of the vocal bands in production of tone and tone-quality in our organs of speech. With this novel fact I announce an original discovery."
It is such stuff as this that these people feed upon and believe in as revelations of great moment. Yet Dr. Miller and his coadjutors might sit before these cavities or hollow spaces till the end of time, looking, observing, probing, measuring, weighing, and determining their relation to the vocal bands and vice versa, and not a vestige of the spirit of the voice would ever make its appearance. The last conundrum of this kind, and it has special reference to my discoveries, is as follows: "May not the disturbance of speech known as stammering or stuttering be mainly a condition caused by the putting out of gear of one air-chamber in its relationship to other air-chambers, whereby the air-pressures during the speech-act are at war with one another, resulting in the well-known manifestations?" (Werner's Magazine for September, 1898, page 59). Air-chambers and air-pressures again. I protest against being made particeps criminis in any such proceeding.
When we go back to the earliest recorded times and find traces of an attempt at expression by means of crude signs or figures impressed upon the clay, we can see more of the potentiality of a science (or a civilization) arising therefrom than we can from the teachings of the laryngoscopists, who claim that the voice can be evolved from the relations of various forms of matter to one another, without even a trace of the spirit accompanying them.
Not many years since audiences of intelligent persons were invited to watch a dark tent in which two men were so closely tied together (as it was supposed) that they could not possibly move a limb. From this tent noises would arise as of the dragging of chains along the floor, bells ringing, etc., interposed now and then by a chair being flung through the air. All this was done by the "spirits." This was a proceeding not unlike the one now going on in the materialistic school in connection with the spirit of the voice. There is no more likelihood of the latter arising from the dark tent of the matter they are investigating than of a real spirit appearing in that other tent. The performance, besides, is not as amusing, no chairs being flung, etc. The audience is looking on gravely expectant, but all remains forever monotonously, solemnly, ominously, and cadaverously silent and resultless.