In 1885 I took the late Signor Roberti, teacher of singing in the Normal College at Turin, and an Italian composer of eminence, to hear the Swanley boys, and he afterwards wrote to Mr. Richardson:—
"I do not exaggerate in any way by saying that I found there a true perfection in tune and in rhythm, but above all, in what concerns the pure and correct emission of voices, the careful and judicious training of which confers much honour upon you, and I would be happy to see it even partly imitated by the teachers of the so-called Land of Song."
These facts are enough to prove the weight that attaches to Mr. Richardson's utterances:—
"My experience has been that flattening will give the teacher very little trouble after the pupils have been drilled with voice-training exercises, but until the voices are built and strengthened, he will have unpleasant surprises of all kinds. If he would have a reliable choir he must begin, continue, and end with regular voice training based on an undeniably good system. From the very outset the pupil should be taught to fear flat singing as a demon. With my boys I was for ever laying down the self-evident truth, 'People can endure your singing if it be tuneful, even though all other points of excellence are low, but no one can put up with your singing out of tune, except as martyrs.' The cause of flattening is always lack of culture. In the choirs I have trained it has ceased to trouble me after a few months. The habit of letting the pitch drop fosters itself in a remarkable manner, until at last the ear of the performer is perfectly satisfied with the production of a monstrosity. In proof of this I would mention a case which has come painfully under my own notice. A number of boys known to me have been in the daily habit of singing the tune:—
and as they have only had a 'go as you please system' to hold them in, they now commence flattening at once with a crescendo which culminates in the second line, and creates the effect:—
The original quite gone, they quite satisfied! The cause of continued flat singing is allowing the bad habit. I am not, of course, dealing with exceptional cases of natural inaptitude. These are rare, and I say this after having had some years of experience in testing individual voices. I could now with very little difficulty name the few pupils I had at Swanley who were naturally unable to sing tunefully, and I doubt not that nearly all my old scholars could do the same. They were in reality exceptions, numbering, during the whole of the time I was with them, not more than half-a-dozen.
"There is one stage in the voice training where the teacher finds his pupils (boys I am speaking of, my experience with adults not having been so extensive) habitually sharpen. In my own neighbourhood a teacher who has commenced to properly train his boys to sing, in a conversation he had with me told me of this, to him, unexpected difficulty. To get good intonation in part-singing, I found the singing of chords a great help. The class should be divided rapidly, and one note of the chord assigned to each section. Then it should be sung softly. This should be repeated with other chords, and followed by easy phrases. Voices do not at once blend, and until they do the singing should be never loud. I look upon the earlier work as tentative—a feeling for the beauty of perfection of pitch, tunefulness, and intonation. A practice to be condemned is that of learning the parts of a tune separately, and then bringing them together. There are, of course, places where it is absolutely necessary to give special attention to exceptional passages, but it is a mistake to teach each part as though it were an independent tune—to give the direction, which I have often heard, 'Now sing your part, and never mind what the others are doing,' or 'Don't you listen to any other part.' This system is answerable for the most offending cases of want of tunefulness, in which one part will sing on with the greatest of satisfaction in a key a semitone from that in which the part above or below is moving. The ear should be prepared by a symphony, or by thinking of the key before a piece is commenced. My own practice has been to wait after giving the key-note for the pupils to do this. I have recently come across a method of allowing the pupils to find the tonic of a song about to be sung, which in nine cases out of ten will make the opening as 'restless' as the sea waves. The teacher strikes the C fork, and the tonic being F, all the pupils sing C', B, A, G, F—doh. The C', B, A, G, F is, I think, as likely to unsettle the ear as anything that could be imagined. The teacher should give the key-note. He may teach his pupils to use the fork if he will, but not in a way so exquisitely calculated to unsettle the ear when it should be strongly decided.
"With regard to Registers, I do not know whether the nomenclature I employed with my Swanley choir will be commended by you, but as it was successful I will describe it. The registers we called, perhaps inelegantly, 'Top,' 'Middle,' and 'Bottom,' these terms being handier than Upper Thin, Lower Thin, and Upper Thick. The earliest exercises were in the Top Register—that is, the Upper Thin. Boys untrained are, taken in bulk, unconscious of the Thin Register. Having got them to sing, say C to koo, I have followed it by singing to the same syllable the tune:—