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

by Katherine Jewell Everts

Third.—Stand and test your newly acquired power by trying to breathe diaphragmatically while on your feet.

These three exercises constitute the first step in the first stage of vocal training, and that step is called Learning to Support the Tone.

I know a little girl who, in the beginning of her career, alarmed her parents by refusing to utter a syllable or the semblance of a syllable until she was three years old, when she evidently considered herself ready for her maiden effort at speech. Prepared she proved, for, sitting at the window in her high-chair one day, watching people pass, she remarked quietly and with perfect precision, "There goes Mrs. Tibbets." I find myself secretly wishing it were possible for you to refrain from speech, not for three years, but for three weeks, while you quietly prepare for speech by practising these three breathing exercises. It is quite the customary thing (or ought to be) for the teacher of voice as an instrument of song to require of the student a period of silence—that is, a period in which only exercises are allowed, and songs, even the simplest, are forbidden. However, our only way to secure this condition would be to go into retreat; but, after all, one of the most encouraging things about this work is the remarkable effect upon the speaking voice of simply holding the thought of the right condition for tone, thinking the three exercises I have given you. It is not so remarkable, perhaps, in the light of the experiment recently made (I am told) in one of our great colleges, when three men daily performed a certain exercise, and three other men simply thought it intensely, and the resultant effect upon the muscles used in the act was marvelously similar. I am half afraid to have recalled this, lest you take advantage of the suggestion and relax your effort, or, out of curiosity, make the experiment. Please don't. I offer it only as an incentive to you, to think at least of the desired condition, if you cannot every day indulge in an active effort to attain it.

Please test at once the immediate effect of this third exercise. Take the attitude I have defined, and try once more any full-voweled syllable. I think you will find the tone already improved.

LEARNING TO FREE THE TONE

We have worked, so far, for support of tone. We must now free the supported tone, by freeing the channel for the emission of the breath as it is converted into tone and moulded into speech. We shall find that in learning to support the tone we have gone far toward securing that freedom; but the habit of years is not easily overcome, and every time you have spoken without proper support of breath you have forced the tone from the throat, by tightening the muscles and closing the channel, thus making conditions which must now be reformed by steady, patient effort. Yet it is not effort I want from you now; it is lack of effort. It is passivity; it is surrender. I want you to relax all the muscles which govern the organs concerned in converting the breath into tone and moulding the tone into speech, all the muscles controlling the throat and mouth, including the lips and jaw. I want utter passivity of the parts from the point where the column of breath strikes the vocal cords to where, as tone, it is moulded into the word "No." Surrender to the desire to utter that word. Concentrate your thought on two things: the taking of the breath and the word it is to become. Now, lying down, or sitting easily, lazily, in a comfortable chair, or standing leaning against the wall, with closed eyes, surrender to the thought "No," and, taking a breath, speak. Still hard and unmusical you find? Yes, but I am sure not so hopelessly hard as before. What shall we do to relax the tense muscles, to release the throat and free the channel? At the risk of being written down a propagandist, in the ranks of the extreme dress-reformers, I shall say, first of all, take off those high, tight collars. Again, as with the corset, it is a case of a misfit rather than too tight a fit. If your collar is cut to fit, it need not be too high nor too tight for comfort, and it will still be becoming. You want it to cling to the neck and keep the line. Cut it to fit, and it will keep the line; then put in pieces of whalebone, if necessary, or resort to some of the many other devices now in vogue for keeping the soft collar erect, but don't choke yourself, either by fastening it too tight or cutting it too high. But how simple it would be if we could relax the tension by doffing our ill-fitting corsets and collars. Alas! the trouble is deeper seated than that.

It is an indisputable and most unfortunate fact that nervous tension registers itself more easily in the muscles about the mouth and throat than anywhere else. So, if we live as do even the children of to-day, under excitement, and so in a state of nervous tension, the habit of speaking with the channel only half open is quickly formed, and the voice becomes shrill and harsh. You have noticed that the more emphatic one grows in argument the higher and harder the voice becomes, and, incidentally, the less convincing the argument. This is true of all excitement; the nervous tension accompanying it constricts the throat, and the result is a closed channel. To learn instinctively to refer this tension for registration not to the throat, but to the diaphragm, is a part of vocal training. This can be easily accomplished with children, and the habit established of taking a deep breath under the influence of any emotion. This breath will cause the throat to open instead of shut, and the tone to grow full, deep, and round, instead of high and harsh. The full, deep, round tone will carry twice as far as the high, harsh, breathy one. The one deep breath resulting in the full, deep tone may—nay, will—often serve the same purpose as Tattycoram's "Count five-and-twenty," and save the angry retort.

It is useless to regret, on either ethical or aesthetic grounds, that we were not taught in childhood to take the deep breath and make the deep tone. But let us look to it that the voices and dispositions of our children are not allowed to suffer. Meanwhile, in correcting the fault in the use of our own instruments, we shall go far toward establishing the proper condition with the next generation, since the child is so mimetic that, to hear sweet, quiet, low tones about him will have more effect than much technical training in keeping his voice free and musical. In the same way, the child who hears good English spoken at home seems less dependent upon text-books in grammar and rhetoric to perfect his verbal expression than the child who is not so fortunate in this respect.

To insure the registration of nervous tension in the muscles controlling the diaphragm and not the throat—that is, to form the habit of breathing deeply when speaking under the influence of emotion, is our problem. The present fault in registration will be found to be different with each one of us, or, at least, will cause us "to flock together" according to the place of registration. Each must locate for himself his own difficulty, or go to a vocal specialist and have it located. The tension may be altogether in the muscles governing the throat, or it may be in those about the mouth. There is the resultant, breathy tone, the hard tone, the nasal tone, the guttural tone, the tone that issues from a set jaw or an unruly tongue. All mean tension of muscles somewhere, and must be met by relaxation of these muscles and the freeing of the channel. How to relax the throat shall be our initial point of attack. A suggestion made by my first teacher proved most helpful to me, a suggestion so simple that I did not for the moment take it seriously. "Think," she said, "how your throat feels just before you yawn." "Yes," I replied, irrelevantly, "and just after you have eaten a peppermint—that cool, delicious, open sensation." This impressed her as significant, but not so effective as her suggestion to me, which I felt to be true when I began to think of it seriously, and so, of course, to yawn furiously. Try it.

Think of the yawn. Close your eyes and feel how the deep breath with which the yawn begins (the need of which, indeed, caused it) opens the throat, relaxing all the muscles. Now, instead of yawning, speak. The result will be a good tone, simply because the condition for tone was right. The moment the yawn actually arrives, the condition is lost, the throat closes; but in that moment before the break into the yawn, the muscles about the throat relax and the channel opens, as the muscles controlling the diaphragm tighten and the deep breath is taken.