Books upon books have been written on voice training, and will continue to be written. The preceding pages have been devoted to the fundamental subject of tone production, but it is time to suggest that back of the voice and the song is the singer himself with his complex personality. Back of the personality is the soul itself, forever seeking utterance through its mask of personality. All genuine impulse to sing is from the soul in its need for expression. Through expression comes growth in soul consciousness and desire for greater and greater self-expression.
Singing is far more than "wind and muscle," for, as Ffrangcon-Davies puts it, "The whole spiritual system, spirit, mind, sense, soul, together with the whole muscular system from feet to head, will be in the wise man's singing, and the whole man will be in the tone."
Of all the expressions of the human spirit in art form, the sublimated speech we call song is the most direct. Every other art requires some material medium for its transmission, and in music, subtlest of all the arts, instruments are needed, except in singing only.
FREEDOM
In song the singer himself is the instrument of free and direct expression. Freedom of expression, complete utterance, is prevented only by the singer himself. No one hinders him, no one stands in the way but himself. The business of the teacher is to set free that which is latent. His high calling is by wise guidance to help the singer to get out of his own way, to cease standing in front of himself. Technical training is not all in all. Simple recognition of the existence of our powers is needed even more. Freedom comes through the recognition and appropriation of inherent power; recognition comes first, the appropriation then follows simply. The novice does not know his natural power, his birthright, and must be helped to find it, chiefly, however, by helping himself, by cognizing and re-cognizing it.
No student of the most human of all arts—singing—need give up if he has burning within him the song impulse, the hunger to sing. This inner impulse is by its strength an evidence of the power to sing; the very hunger is a promise and a prophecy.
DETERRENTS
The deterrents to beautiful singing are physical in appearance, but these are outer signs of mental or emotional disturbance. Normal poise, which is strength, smilingly expresses itself in curves, in tones of beauty.
Mental discord results in angularity, rigidity, harshness.
Impatience produces feverishness that makes vocal poise impossible; and impatience induces the modern vice of forcing the tone. Growth is a factor for which hurried forcing methods make no allowance.