Vocal Expression: A Class-book of Voice Training and Interpretation

by Katherine Jewell Everts

Let us then repeat the original statement, having read the passage in which Emerson has elaborated it. Now, what you must demand of your voice is this: that it shall so handle the single introductory sentence as to suggest the rest of the paragraph. In other words, your voice must do the paraphrasing, by means of its changes in pitch, its inflections, and its variations in tone-color; by means, in short, of its vocal vocabulary.

I

STUDY IN PAUSE AND CHANGE OF PITCH

It is asserted that, "the last word has not been said on any subject." Mr. Hamilton Mabie seemed to me to achieve a last word on the subject of pause when he casually remarked: "Emerson was a master of pause; he would pause, and into the pool of expectancy created by that pause drop just the right word." There seems little to be added to complete the exposition of that single sentence. It surely leaves no doubt in our minds as to the effect to be desired from the use of this element of our vocabulary. How to use it to gain that effect is our problem. First of all, we must cease to be afraid to pause. We hurry on over splendid opportunities to elucidate our text through a just use of this form of emphasis, beset by two fears: fear that we shall seem to have forgotten the text; fear that we shall actually forget it if we stop to think. Think of being afraid to stop to think lest we should stop thinking! That is precisely what the fear indicates. It arises, of course, from a confusion as to the real nature of pause. We confuse pause with its ghost, hesitation. Dr. Curry makes the difference clear for us in his definition of hesitation as an "empty pause." "Empty of what?" you ask. Empty of thought! Of course, an empty pause is a ghastly as well as a ghostly thing to experience. If you have ever faced an audience in one of those "awful" moments when your voice has ceased because your thought has stopped, and when you are painfully aware of a pool of embarrassed sympathy into which you know there is no word to drop, then you have learned the meaning of an empty pause.

On the other hand, if you shall ever face an audience in one of those fateful moments when your voice pauses because your thought is so vital, that you realize both your audience and you must be given time to fully grasp it, and when you are serenely conscious of that "pool of expectancy" into which you know you have just the right word to drop, then you will learn the meaning of a true pause.

Some one has called inflection a running commentary of the emotions upon the thought. Emphasis might well be defined in the same way. The definition would need to be a bit more inclusive, since emphasis includes inflection. Emphasis then may be defined as a running commentary of the thought and emotion of the reader upon the thought of the text he interprets. The words reveal the thought; your valuation of that thought, as you interpret it, is revealed through your vocal vocabulary in voicing it. We, your auditors, can only gather from your emphasis your valuation of the truth or importance of what you are uttering. You may use one or all of the elements of your vocal vocabulary to bring out the thought of a single phrase. The elements of the vocal vocabulary are all forms of emphasis.

Since pause is a cessation of speech it can hardly be called an element of a vocal vocabulary; but it may rightly be called the basis of our vocabulary because it determines our use of the other elements. It behooves us then to make a study of pause before testing our vocabulary as to its other elements.

Here are two texts to be valued by our use of the pause.

EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF A BOARDING-SCHOOL GIRL

At midnight, the magic hour as every girl knows for affairs of a purely private and personal nature, when far away at the end of a corridor you can almost hear Miss ——'s peaceful snore, when as the poet aptly put it in this morning's English stunt, "darkness clears our vision which by day is sun-blind"—(I thought Jane and I would die laughing and give it all away when we came to that line in Mr. Lanier's stupid poem),—well, as I say, exactly at that hour my heart began to beat so hard I thought it would wake Madge without the "punch" I had promised to give her when it was time to begin preparations for our grand spread.