Position of the Lips.—In speaking and reading aloud during your preliminary training for singing, be very careful that there be no change in the aperture of the mouth or position of the lips while uttering any one sound, however prolonged. If the lips move from their first position, however slightly, the tone immediately changes, and the pronunciation ceases to be pure and refined.
Study of Words.—The words of a song are as much worthy of the singer's study as the music, that is, if the song is worth singing at all. I do not mean to say that in themselves they must necessarily be of equal merit, but that they require as much attention on the part of the singer to bring out their meaning. Study the text, therefore, apart from the music. Read the words aloud deliberately; master the sentiment of them, and note the prominent words and phrases, so as to be able to give them their due value when you have to combine them with the music. Avoid giving prominence to such words as "of," "for," "the," "and," "in," &c., &c., but yet let each be distinctly pronounced, and not slurred over in an indefinite murmur. Learn the words of your song by memory. Master the text, and consider the whole from an elocutionist's point of view before you attack the musical side of the matter. A singer when singing in public should not be troubled with his words and music too.
General Education.—An important branch of study is that of giving expression to the passions, and of communicating your conceptions and emotions to the minds of your listeners. No better training could a young singer have for forming such ideas than the earnest perusal of the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Milton, Lytton, George Eliot, &c.; or in watching carefully and intelligently the acting of our best stage performers. For a singer to be successful, he or she must be in a position to express, and bring home to an audience, such emotions as love, hatred, anger, fear, grief, and pity; all these, and many other such feelings, have constantly to be transmitted by the singer, and it is to the most natural and faithful exposition of these, and that most consistent with the other equally important points of the art of singing, that the student's attention should for a long while be patiently and perseveringly directed.
The singer should be a well-educated man, and he should know at least one other language beside his native tongue. He should be well read, too, in the best literature of these two languages. On questions of all the arts he should seek to make his views sound and true. He should seek to travel, and so enlarge his mind, for all this training will reflect itself in the work of an artist so liberally educated. An inferior education has been the bane of many a student, who has had the organ and all the necessary musical ability.
Dramatic Study.—To be a successful public singer, even in the concert-room, one must be more or less an actor; and, therefore, the time and money bestowed in acquiring a sound knowledge of dramatic action and elocution will be well spent. For the lyric stage, such a study is imperative; but its utility to artists who aspire no higher than to ballad or oratorio singing cannot be too highly estimated.
[VOICES AND THEIR VARIOUS QUALITIES.]
The life of the singing voice is so comparatively short, that the study of singing is rendered more difficult than that of any other art. You may buy a violin or a pianoforte, ready-made and perfect, in your childhood, and nothing remains for you but to study the instrument diligently under a good master. But the vocal instrument cannot be said to exist at all, for purposes of singing study, before the age of eighteen or twenty in males, and (in our climate) sixteen in females. Even at those ages the organ is necessarily immature and undeveloped. Consequently the study of the art has to be carried on during the progress of the instrument to maturity.
To counterbalance this disadvantage, however, we must bear in mind that that very study materially helps to perfect the instrument. Singing is by no means all "style," and the study of it includes the formation of the voice and production of a good tone, and it is, of course, easier to manipulate an unfinished article than a finished one—to educate youth and suppleness than to bring maturity and stiffness into subjection to new conditions.