I started out to write a blog about the “passaggio”. You know that thing that boys get to play or fight with while doing classical music. While I was processing a pile of words about the “Magic Passage” my wife, Debbie, found the “Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Volume 7” in a Google search. Tenor that I am, I had no idea that these books (how many volumes are there anyway?) were even published. The fact that some of them lay waiting to be raided by anyone with a computer and internet is worth a party with fireworks…sorry….for now, I’ll have to do without the fireworks. I don’t have a license to play with those things here in NYS. Anyway, Google’s stash of old books is now very high on my list of the best free offers on the net. Garcia’s “Observations on the Human Voice” is on page 399.
If you’re interested in the TRUTH about singing, read this little bit of Garcia from 1855. He paints a word picture of a magnificently complex system. Certainly the abilities of the human voice he describes in the first pages of his magnum opus (check out “Why Garcia?”) find some explanation in this very intricate and yet tiny structure. His presentation seems to torpedo the other theories of phonation that were still floating around at the time this was published. I don’t think that his theory under the heading “Manner in which the sounds are formed” immediately silenced all other opinion, but it is the one that survived the test of time. It was Garcia’s first paragraph under the heading: “Conjectures on the Formation of the different Registers” on page 405 that made me toss most of my pile of words about “passaggio” out the back door of my blogging hut. For me, this text is the key to unlocking some “secret” things in Garcia’s writings. It also answered questions I had from reading some biographical material about him. I’m not saying that all my questions are answered. I’m saying that my education is still ongoing and what I learn clears my vision.
In the paragraph I referenced above the words “the cause of the different tones called registers, must be sought for in the muscles which set these ligaments in motion” are the key to everything that follows in this blog. Under the last heading in his “Observations”, “Of the Qualities of the Voice.” Garcia reiterates his assertion that the quality of glottal closure gives rise to either brilliant or veiled sounds. Wait….. I thought Garcia said something about finding the causal agent for the registers within the structures that form the glottis. I want more from Garcia. I want him to tell me what the registers really are. Does he?
In his “Hints” we find Garcia prevaricating while I want a straight answer. In his response to the question “What is a register?” does Garcia explain what a “mechanism” is? No he does not. Neither does he explain what “another mechanism” might be. It is at this point the instruction “use your brain” becomes extremely important. Garcia is credited with this instruction by his biographer. Check out the end of “Mind over Matter”. I get the implication here. Garcia really does know something, but he is not sharing it with us.
Before Debbie dropped the “Proceedings of the Royal Society” on my laptop, I cherished as my very favorite Garcia challenge something I found in his “Hints”. The Q and A discussion that leads to the text I am about to type out for you starts under the heading “4. SOUND (RESONANCE).” on page 6. The key text is on the next page. After discussing his theory of phonation Garcia poses the question “Has this observation any importance?” and decorates it with a margin note: “Secret of Tone-Colour”.
What Garcia says here is a much more inclusive statement than that margin note would imply: “indeed initiates him (the singer) into all the secrets of voice-production.” Hold on there. What is the list of theories the singer must explore to attain initiation into “ALL” “SECRETS” concerning “VOICE-PRODUCTION”?
- Glottal Closure
- Timbres
- Breath
Now that we know the list, what are the secrets? Garcia knew what he was talking about. Why didn’t he make a full disclosure of everything I want him to explain? I have my own ideas about that but I’m going to go Garcia on you and keep them in the realm of my “Secrets” for future blogs.
Now let’s get to some of the words I didn’t throw out the back door.
Garcia didn’t seem to bother about “passaggio” and happy I am he didn’t. I’ve been saying for years that it doesn’t exist. That word describes only a few notes on the musical scale. Although I never found Garcia using this term, he does give advice about those few notes in “Hints on Singing” at page 39. However, on page 14 of the same book we find Garcia warning that certain expertise must be developed before the advice on page 39 should be attempted. Garcia is even more cautionary in his Treatise and because the book is anything but free I quote it here:
“We will not concern ourselves at first with the messa di voce, which we believe needs to be treated only in one of the advanced chapters of this first part. To spin out the tones [messa di voce] is to refine [polir] them, to give them their final polish [vernis]. In order to succeed in it, it is necessary to master the action of the lungs and that of the pharynx. The study of the messa di voce, if one indulged in it at the beginning, would succeed only in fatiguing the student without teaching him anything. The ability to spin out tones should in a way be the result of all the other studies; to be able to spin out tones well is to be a singer.”
It is on page 133 of part one of Paschke’s translation of Garcia’s big book that we find the “advanced chapter” ii. Drawn out tones (messa di voce, spianata di voce) to which he alludes in the above quote. I’m going to wimp out for now and not type it into this blog. Forgive me for putting it off, but that chapter will be the basis for more than a few blogs to come.
The following appears on page 48:
There is a small variation in wording that Paschke includes in the Appendix that has large implication:
Does anyone detect the inconsistencies in these extracts? Am I complaining? Do I want to say that Garcia must be confused about register and timbre because I see overlapping labels for what would seem to be one and the same thing? Not at all. I am sure Garcia was well aware of the risk that someone like me could nit-pick his text to death over his tendency to use the words “chest register” and “clear timbre” interchangeably. That would be if someone like me wanted to claim he was really an ignorant dummy whose memory is deserving of extinction. This is not true of me, but I have read dismissive writings that reveal the existence of living individuals who seem to wish Garcia would just be forgotten. So far, the literary output that I have read from such resentful pedagogical practitioners has yet to focus on this risky inconstancy. I’m not hoping someone will take up the challenge and use my observations as a club with which to beat Garcia about the head. I’m just saying that the risk has always been there.
So what is my point? First, the “passaggio” doesn’t exist. The above quote from page 48 was enough for me to understand a long time ago that Garcia was telling us a lot about what a listener expected to hear from a tenor. In the first paragraph he explains that the listener did not want to hear the juvenile clear thin tones that we tenors are all capable of producing on and above the notes delineated by the label “passaggio”. He tells us that we should always sing these notes with an application of “Sombre Timbre”. In the second paragraph he instructs us to sing all the notes under discussion in the “falsetto” register. Is this confusion or a hint about “passaggio”? Neither. It is an invitation to take into account everything he wrote and understand the implications. At least, for this tenor, register and “timbre” began to crystallize as two words describing one function. When I got hold of the “Proceedings” I began to understand that it was more complicated, but at least not MAGIC. When you add the extract from the Paschke Appendix to this mix you are faced with Garcia placing men and women in the same harness. We are all under the restriction to avoid “clear timbre” on the same notes that are discussed on Page 48. The chronology is definitely important. He had not invented the laryngoscope yet and had not presented his “Observations” in the “Proceedings”. It is in this deleted text appearing in the Appendix of Garcia’s Magnum Opus that I get the full picture. I understand now that before 1854 Garcia was leading his reader to infer that “Clear Timbre” = “chest register” and that “Sombre Timbre” equals “falsetto register”. This is not confusion, but a clarification. These magic words: “Low Voice”, “Chest Voice”, “Chest Register”, “Falsetto Voice”, “Middle Voice”, “High Voice”, “Head Voice” and “Passaggio” are all just labels for note ranges in which different functional abilities of the human voice come into play. Garcia was quite careful to describe for us these functional abilities as precisely as he could. He completed this list of functional attributes of the vocal organs with the aid of his little mirror. His “Observations on the Human Voice.” tells me to forget all that “Sombre/Clear Timbre” stuff and to now look to the vocal chords, and the observed abilities of those little ligaments for the productive cause of the registers. My inference is now: Chest Voice = complete glottal closure = the brilliant sound that is foundational to “Clear Timbre” and Falsetto/Middle/Head Voice = incomplete glottal closure = veiled sounds that can be used to complement or reinforce “Sombre Timbre”.
Do the registers exist? Yes they do exist as words in our vocabulary that we can use to discuss note ranges. They do not exist as inviolate Holy Ground that must be entered through the narrow gates of Register Events. The dressing up of our voices, ladies and laddies, with the sonic character expected from our voices in any of the registers is only really dependent on taste. Garcia set his sights on answering the question: “What do we use to get it done?”
Go back up to the two text variations on what to do about the note range:
You will see that Garcia bases his arguments on taste. No one wants to hear a grown person sound like a “choir boy”…. Wait, that is no longer true. Let’s just say Garcia didn’t want to hear such a sound come out of the mouth of a mature individual. Before he laid eyes on the glottis, Garcia was happy to mix girls and boys together in his advice about “Clear Timbre”, but when he was able to see the better picture of the vocal function it became difficult to keep them together. He came to see that for boys “Sombre Timbre” was the only necessary component with which to dress up the male voice in order to avoid the sound of a choir boy. Complete Glottal Closure and Incomplete Glottal Closure is independently applicable to the sound according to the male artist’s choice. For the girls this is not perfectly the case. The pre 1854 advice mixing the sexes together had to be thrown out, because Garcia saw that, for the ladies, Incomplete Glottal Closure was the indispensable tool to use to avoid that unacceptable childlike sound. I’m sure he moved the discussion of the above note range out of timbre territory in his first edition into the register region of his later editions because he knew that this conclusion changed the argument from timbre use to register placement which really gives away this “Timbre equals Register” thing. I believe it is one of the truths he wanted to keep under his label “SECRETS”. We singers are challenged by Garcia to uncover “ALL” such “SECRETS” by mastering messa di voce.
Who wants to take the challenge?