How long should the breath be retained before emission? There can be no hard and fast rule. It is a matter of circumstance entirely, and it certainly is detrimental to postpone the next inspiration to the last moment before the next note has to be intoned or the next phrase started. Every opportune rest should be utilized for inspiration, and, if possible, the breath should be inhaled a second or two before the note or phrase to be sung, and the breath retained until the crucial moment. Then breath and song together should float out in a steady stream. The result will be pure, full, resonant tone. A pianissimo upon a full breath is like the pianissimo of a hundred violins, which is a hundred times finer than that of a single instrument, and so rich in quality that it carries much further. It is the stage-whisper of music.
This pause and the steadiness produced by it probably constitute what the old Italian masters of singing had in mind when they laid down for their pupils the rule "filar il tuono" or "spin the tone,"
in other words, the practice of emitting the breath just sufficiently to produce a whisper and then convert it into a delicate and exquisite tone—a mere filament of music. Even in rapid passages which succeed each other at very brief intervals and such as frequently occur in the Italian arias, it is possible to replenish the breath in such a way that some pause, however brief, can be made between inspiration and expiration. Watch Melba singing the Mad Scene from Lucia, Tetrazzini, the Shadow Song from Dinorah, or Sembrich, the music of the Queen of the Night in the Magic Flute, and you will observe that they replenish the original intake of breath with half-breaths, a practice which enables them at every opportunity to make the required pause before breath-emission. Moreover, it always allows of a reserve quantity of air being retained in the lungs. That sense of unwasted resource, the feeling so important to convey to the audience that, much as the singer has accomplished, the limit of his capacity has by no means been reached, and that, like a great commander, he has his forces well in hand, is holding back his reserves and does not expect to launch them into action at all, can be created only by perfect control of the air-column; and that control of breath is gained
best by a pause, if only for a fraction of a second, between inspiration and expiration.
Moreover, holding the breath for a little while before expiration is conducive to good health, a condition, needless to say, which creates confidence and buoyancy in the singer and adds greatly to the efficiency of his voice and the effectiveness of his performance. Proper breathing is a cleaning process for the interior of the body. It cleanses the residual air, the air that remains in the lungs after each respiration; and it does much more. Air enters the lungs as oxygen; it comes out as carbonic acid, an impure gas created by the impurities of the body. The process of breathing dispatches the blood on a cleansing process through the whole body, and, while traveling through this, it collects all the poisonous gases and carries them back to the lungs to be emitted with expiration. By holding the breath we prolong this process, make it more thorough, and correspondingly free the body of more impurities. From the classic ages down physicians have advocated retaining the breath for a little while after inspiration as an aid to general health, and the taking and holding of a full breath has been compared with opening doors and windows of a house for ventilation.
Sir Morell Mackenzie emphasizes this purifying function of respiration in his book on the "Hygiene of the Vocal Organs." It consists, as he says, essentially in an exchange of gases between the blood and the air, wherein the former yields up some of the waste matters of the system in the form of carbonic acid, receiving in return a fresh supply of oxygen. It is evident from this how important it is to have a sufficient supply of pure air, air which contains its due proportion of oxygen to renovate the blood. A room in which a number of people are sitting soon becomes close if the windows and doors are kept shut. This indicates that the oxygen in the air is exhausted, its place being taken by carbonic acid exhaled from the lungs of the assembly, so that the purification of the blood must necessarily become more and more imperfect.
"Besides their principal function of purifying the blood," writes Sir Morell Mackenzie, "the lungs are the bellows of the vocal instrument. They propel a current of air up the windpipe to the narrow chink of the larynx, which throws the membranous edges or lips (vocal cords) of that organ into vibration, and thereby produces sound. Through this small chink, the air escaping from the
lungs is forced out gradually in a thin stream, which is compressed, so to speak, between the edges of the cords that form the opening, technically called the glottis, through which it passes. The arrangement is typical of the economical workmanship of nature. The widest possible entrance is prepared for the air which is taken into the lungs, as the freest ventilation of their whole mucous surface is necessary. When the air has been fully utilized for that purpose it is, if need be, put to a new use on its way out for the production of voice, and in that case it is carefully husbanded and allowed to escape in severely regulated measure, every particle of it being made to render its exact equivalent in force to work the vocal mill-wheel." Thus again is illustrated the close analogy between vocal art and physical law, and further evidence given of the value of a physiological method of voice-production as opposed to those methods that are purely empirical. In fact when it is considered that speech is Nature's method of communication and that song is speech vitalized by musical tone, it would seem as if song were Nature's art and, therefore, more than any other based on Nature's laws.
No effort is involved in holding the breath. The pause