Training the Singing Voice - online book

An exploration of the theories, methods & techniques of Voice training.

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	%                         TRAINING THE SINGING VOIGE nation of self-consciousness, mental anxieties and fears. Extraneous arid unnatural bodily tensions must be obliterated from the behavior pattern. of the singer; the mind must be at ease and oblivious of all striving and the attention entirely devoted to the expressive and communicative pur­poses of the song. Expressions! factors in singing. Besides requiring consummate techni­cal skill and a highly specialized use of the vocal apparatus, singing is also to be considered as a form of self expression, governed by conditions of concentration, spontaneity and joyous release. The voice functions at its best when the singer's mood is buoyant and exhilarated. Carefree atti­tudes are more conducive to natural, spontaneous vocal release than are meticulous techniques; or the conscious manipulation of breathing and vocal muscles; or the planned "placing" of each tone. Joyous release throws the vocal apparatus into high gear when correct feeling tones are superadded to the mere intellectual communication of ideas. From these obserrotioiis the teacher may infer that optimal vocal conditions for sing­ing on be induced by first promoting right thinking and feeling reactions m the student. In other words, wholesome satisfactions must always ac­company good singing, even during practice periods. Simgimg compared to speaking. Singing may be defined as an intensified form erf vocal utterance in which only some of the basic factors of speech are operative. Pedagogical comparisons between singing and speaking consist; largely, of the "sing as you speak" approach, which is the use of certain speaking techniques to help explain or demonstrate analogous singing techniques. Majority opinion favors this teaching approach, a main premise being that, since speech habits predominate in daily life, they therefore greatly influence the singer's vocal habits. But this view­point is rife with opinionated discussion, without benefit of scientific knowledge or experimental evidence. Negative arguments advance the belief that speaking and singing habits are built on exclusively different farms of training. Each has its own basic physiology and its own psycho­logical concomitants. This argument is supported by the reports of scien­tific investigators who find that both physiological and psychological con­ditions are different in singing than in speaking. Moreover, singing is governed by the laws of music, stressing the importance of such factors as pitch, resonance, intensity, rhythm, melodic contour, duration and musi­cal accompaniment. These are factors that have no prominent or fixed value in speech. The "sing as you speak" approach has some pedagogical merit, how­ever, especially for its possible psychological effect upon the freedom, spontaneity and cemmunicative expressiveness of the singing voice. Any