CHAPTER IX
Throat Stiffness
What is the most frequent obstacle to good singing, the difficulty with which pupil and teacher most contend? Throat stiffness. What more than anything else mars the singing of those we hear in drawing-rooms, churches, and the concert room? Throat stiffness.
This is the vice that prevents true intonation, robs the voice of its expressiveness, limits its range, lessens its flexibility, diminishes its volume, and makes true resonance impossible.
This great interferer not only lessens the beauty of any voice, but directly affects the organ itself. The muscles of the larynx are small and delicate, and the adjustments they make in singing are exceedingly fine. When, however, the voice user stiffens his throat, these delicate muscles in their spontaneous effort to make the proper adjustments are compelled to contract with more than their normal strength. Every increase in throat stiffness demands a corresponding increase in muscle effort, an overexertion that persisted in must result in injury to the organ itself. Such misuse of the voice is bound to show injurious results. Every throat specialist knows this, and an untold multitude of those who, beginning with promise, have had to give up singing as a career, learn it too late.
Singers are so accustomed to the sound of their own voices as to be usually quite unconscious of their own throat stiffness, though they may recognize it in their neighbor.
Unfortunately throat stiffness by its very nature tends to aggravate itself, to constantly increase while the voice becomes less and less responsive to the singer's demands.
There are a number of contributing causes to throat stiffness, but the principal cause is throat consciousness and misplaced effort, due largely to current misconceptions regarding the voice. A common notion is that we sing with the throat, whereas we sing through it. Akin to this error is the notion, as common as it is fallacious, that force of tone, carrying power, originates in the larynx, whereas the initial tone due to the vibration of the vocal cords is in itself comparatively feeble. As shown at length in [Chapters VI] and [VII], volume of tone, its color and carrying power, is acoustically and vocally a matter of resonance.
Many there are who sing by dint of sheer force and ignorance, but their careers are necessarily short. The too common vulgar striving for power rather than for beauty or purity of tone induces unnatural effort and strain that both directly and sympathetically affect the throat with stiffness.