FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING VOICE-PRODUCTION.
It is highly important for the speaker or singer to realize early in his career that all forms of artistic expression can be carried out only through movements—muscular movements; in other words, technique or execution implies the use of neuro-muscular mechanisms. However beautiful the conception in the mind of the painter, it can only become an artistic thing when it assumes material form—when it is put on canvas. The most beautiful melody is no possession of the world while it is in the mind of the composer alone; till it is expressed, it is as good as non-existent.
Even poetry can only affect us when it exists in the form of words produced by lip or pen. Between the glowing thought of the poet and the corresponding emotion produced in ourselves there must intervene some form of technique—i.e., some application of neuro-muscular action. This latter term is a convenient one, and has been already explained. It is a condensed expression for that use of the nervous and muscular systems that results in movements, simple or complex.
Without nerve-cells and muscles movements are impossible, speaking generally, and for a willed or voluntary movement there must be something more, an idea or concept. Before one can make a movement resulting in a simple line or even dot on a piece of paper, he must have the idea of that line or dot in mind. In like manner, before one plays or sings a single note, he must have the idea of that note in mind; in other words, the idea is the antecedent to the movement, and absolutely essential. To have such an idea, memory is necessary. It is impossible to sing a tone after another, as an imitative effort, unless one has the power to retain that tone in memory for at least a brief period of time; and before this same tone can be reproduced on sight of it as represented by a written note, the memory of the sound to which it answers must first be recalled; and not only so, but other memories—indeed, memories of all the sensations associated with the bodily mechanism used in producing it.
This applies to all movements, of whatever kind, that we at any time execute. Without the past—i.e., without memories—no present. Some of the memories associated with an act may be lost, and others, sufficient for its performance in some fashion, remain. A man may forget, after the lapse of months or years, how to tie his necktie in a certain way, as he stands before a mirror; yet on turning away he may succeed at once. In this case the visual memories, those that come through the eyes, were lost, but others, those associated with muscular movements, remain. The muscular sense may prove an adequate guide when the visual is ineffective.
In the same way, one may call up a melody by moving the fingers over the piano keys, when it cannot otherwise be recovered, or one rescues an air from oblivion by humming a few of its tones; all of which is explained by the revival of muscular and similar memories.
All voluntary movements are at first accomplished relatively slowly and with difficulty. They soon weary us. A child learns to walk with the greatest difficulty, and only after numberless failures or errors. The first tones of the would-be pianist or violinist are produced but slowly and with great difficulty, in spite of the most determined effort. If the attempts to vocalize are any more successful, it is because one has already learned to talk—a process that in the first instance (in infancy) was even more laborious than that of walking.
The degree to which any one succeeds in his earliest efforts to sing a scale will depend on the readiness with which he can use a variety of neuro-muscular mechanisms—indeed, all those associated with the respiratory, laryngeal, and resonance apparatus. Fortunately for the voice-user, this apparatus has all been in use in ordinary speaking. But when this latter process is analyzed, it is found that it is not essentially different from singing. In each the same mechanism is used, and in much the same way; but every one knows that not all who can talk are able to sing, and it is usual to say that those who cannot have no "ear" for music; and this expresses a part of the truth, though not in a scientific way. What is really the truth is found to be, on analysis, that certain guiding sensations, chiefly those from the hearing apparatus (ear, nerves, brain), are insufficient, owing either to natural defect or lack of training; but that this is not the only explanation is plain from the fact that many composers with the most vivid musical imagination, the most perfect auditory memory, and the most acute ear, cannot sing in any but the most imperfect manner. As we have said before, the speaker of great power to affect his fellows through tones, or the artistic singer, must be a sort of vocal athlete. In the athlete there is a very perfect association into one whole of certain sensations from eye, skin, muscles, etc., and certain movements. These exist in all men, but in very unequal degree. The singer is a tone specialist in whom the perception of the pitch and the quality of sounds may not be more acute than in the composer, possibly less so, but he can do what the composer of music often cannot—viz., associate these sensations with muscular movements of a highly perfect character; in different words, he has the technique which others have not in an equal degree.
In the singer and speaker there is a very close association between the sensations of the resonance-chambers, the larynx, and other parts of the vocal mechanism, and those from the ear. So perfect does this become from training that the necessary technique at last becomes easy. But it is of the greatest importance that the exact nature of this process be realized by both students and teachers, for weighty considerations grow out of it.
We wish to impress the fact that the nature of all neuro-muscular processes is essentially the same. Learning to sing is like learning to talk, and the latter is not radically different from learning to walk. This last is at first slow, imperfect, laborious, and largely a voluntary or willed process, or, more strictly, a series of processes. As progress is made, there is less of the voluntary and more that is involuntary, or what physiologists term reflex. When ideas, feelings, etc., enter into a process which is carried out reflexly, a habit is formed.