The precentor has forwarded your note to me. In answer to your question asking how to prevent the trebles in country choirs from forcing the upper notes, I would suggest that when practising the choir, care should be taken that the trebles are never allowed to sing even the middle notes loud, only mf, and they should be frequently practised to sing piano. If this be attended to, it will, in a great measure, prevent the forcing of the voice on the higher notes, which should never be practised otherwise than softly.
Country choirs nearly always sing twice as loud as they ought to do, consequently the tone becomes harsh and grating, and they invariably sing the upper notes out of tune.
I never allow the Cathedral choristers to practise in a loud tone of voice, yet their voices are rich and mellow, and there is never any want of power when it is required. Any tendency to force the voice is checked at once. It will be found very useful to practise the trebles with the diatonic scale at a moderately quick pace, taking care to sing it smoothly and piano throughout, first to "OO," next to "Oh," and finally to "Ah."
CHAPTER VI.
PRONUNCIATION IN SINGING.
It is impossible to emphasise too strongly the importance of clear pronunciation in singing. The English, as a rule, pronounce indistinctly. "We carry on our talk," says Mr. H. Deacon, "in mere smudges of sound," a graphic and true way of putting things. The Scotch, Welsh, and Americans pronounce better than we do. Indistinctness and bad dialect arise, roughly speaking, from two sources—impure vowels and omitted consonants. The impure vowels are generally due to local habits of speech, such as the London dialect, which makes a colourless mixture of all the vowels. In some parts of Scotland also the vowels are very impure. The voice-training exercises given elsewhere are several of them directed towards the production of good vowel tone, but the danger is lest the power gained in these should not be applied to the actual words encountered in psalm, canticle, anthem, or hymn. A sentence containing all the vowels may be chanted repeatedly on a monotone, but after all the best exercise consists in constant watchfulness against mispronunciation in the ordinary weekly practice.
Man, according to Mr. R. G. White, may be defined as a consonant-using animal. He alone of all animals uses consonants. The cries of animals and of infants are inarticulate. So is the speech of a drunken man, who descends, vocally as well as in other ways, to the level of the beasts. This idea has been expressed in another way, by saying that vowels express the emotional side of speech, and consonants its intellectual side. All these distinctions point to the great importance of a clear enunciation of initial and final consonants, and a clear separation of words. A well-known bishop said to a candidate for ordination, "Before uttering a second word be sure that you have yourself heard the first."