I always thought there was something more to scaling the registers than just “The Blend”. Renata was not helpful to my understanding, even if she was very helpful to my voice. She made me do a lot of running up and down the scales and boy did I have fun even though Renata was rather generous with her negative comments. She was quick to set me back on track when I wandered into the vocal weeds. I did what Renata told me to do without caring a whit about why she wanted one thing or another. 
Let’s be honest here. I was a kid who knew nothing about singing or Opera. I was just having fun, and voice lessons were party times for me. When High School days were over however, I got curious really fast about the value of all that stuff that I found fun. I was surprised that the vocal world, with which I became acquainted during my short collegiate career, had no interest at all in scale work.
I thought: “Isn’t anyone interested in the scales and arpeggios that Renata made me do?” My complaint is a far cry from the locution: “Oh dear! mayn’t I sing down the scale even once?” that Garcia Jr. is credited with saying to his father. The vocal staff at the two universities I attended had no interest in these things. It was many years later that I had an honest explanation for this modern lack of interest. It was during one of my Master Class efforts to promote Garcia technique in a major music school setting that I was given a big lesson. I was told by an insider that vocal instructors would be hard pressed to include my suggestions in their studio work with the voice students at hand. My new friend on the vocal staff of this major musical mansion told me a lot about the conditions and limitations with which every instructor lived, all of which made the study of scales and arpeggios very unattractive. Number one on the list of limitations was time. There just didn’t seem to be enough of it for such niceties.
Why, I would keep asking myself, did singing scales really matter to Garcia and so many teachers all the way back to Caccini‘s days? Maybe the old ways are irrelevant to today’s tonal idealists, but Garcia lamented the trend in the later part of his life:
At the present day the acquirement of flexibility is not in great esteem, and were it not, perhaps, for the venerable Handel, declamatory music would reign alone. This is to be regretted, for not only must the art suffer, but also the young fresh voices, to which the brilliant florid style is the most congenial; the harder and more settled organs being best suited for declamation. It would not be difficult to trace the causes of the decline of the florid style. Let it suffice, however, to mention, as one of the most important, the disapperance of the race of great singers who, besides originating this art, carried it to its highest point of excellence. The impresario influenced by the exigencies of the modern prima donna, has been constrained to offer less gifted and accomplished virtuose to the composer, who in turn has been compelled to simplify the role of the voice and to rely more and more upon orchestral effects. Thus singing is becoming as much a lost art as the manufacture of Mandarin china or the varnish used by the old masters.
“Hints On Singing” by Manuel Garcia1894 – Google Books page IV
His indictment of the world of singing of his day is not quite as severe as my criticism of today, but the problem was just as big back then as now. I lament that Garcia did not “trace” the “decline of the florid style” for us, because the world of today seems under the impression that tastes just happened to change. That “declamation” was the inevitable evolution of singing toward a modern ideal.
That argument we will have to pick at in other articles, but for today I want to get down to why scales and leaps are so good for you, what they should sound like, and why I believe they were imposed on the singer in the first place.
Doing scales as Garcia suggests is the boot camp of vocal technique. I have every confidence that Renata knew what she wanted to hear while she drove her students through the simple and the complicated note constructs she demanded we sing for her on various vowels. I never did escape my tenor limitations long enough to ask her exactly what it was she wanted to hear, but I now have a good idea from what I can remember of her lessons, from reading Garcia and the experience of finding my way through the life of a singer.
Scales are so basic to a musician’s life that they were taken for granted by everyone. Instrumentalists still have to do scales. The problem they face is obvious to everyone but, perhaps for the tenors who might be reading, I will explain it. It is one of the first difficulties a player has to resolve. Each Key Signature requires a different use of the fingers on the control surfaces of whatever instrument is being played. So scales are impossible to avoid if proficiency in every Key is desired. Back in the dawn of Vocal History even tenors did scales but I don’t think they used their fingers and from the tenor stand point, what’s a Key got to do with singing anyway? Please don’t take me seriously. Keys are important to singing, but “tenor thinking” would prioritize lots of things as more significant.
I believe that, back in the day, scale work was imposed on singers without anyone asking a single “WHY?” My faith comes from hearing musicians use comparative suggestions, and then finding that similar suggestions were written down by some very important music people as old as Quantz. Quantz suggests that the flutist imitate good singing. He also reports that the singers of his day were possessed of the presumption that they were better able to interpret music than instrumentalists. Quantz suggests that the presumed vocal advantage would be true, except for the deficiency of musicianship demonstrated by the singers with whom Quantz was acquainted.
The trumpet player that says: “There are musicians, and then there are singers.” has been around forever. It is no joke because the third shoe to drop would be; and then there are tenors….. I make light of a human weakness that confirms my faith. All the way back to the dawn of Vocal Time we can be secure in our assumption that humans were involved and have always been vulnerable to jealousy. Back when everyone in music had to admit that the vocal soloist was more valuable than the chorus member, I believe a revolution took place and it had consequences. I also believe we can “trace” the consequences back to a good picture of what actually happened.
In those early days, the voice which was dragged out of the chorus to become a soloist had to be placed in some sort of training. Everyone in the band had done scales. Do you think the singer was going to get a pass? No, the singer was going to have to do scales. There are good reasons to do scales, but not to memorize fingerings. The singer was going to have to mimic the instrument to prove proficiency in vocal training. We all know about vocal difficulties like “breaks” and “registers”, which scale work really makes obvious when the singer moves his/her voice up and down the C major scale bumping over the register breaks in both directions. But this would not seem to be the basis for the jealousy implicit in “There are musicians, and then there are singers.” That jealousy rests on something Garcia tells us…. If an instrument can do something, so can the human voice within the limits of its range. The dedicated singer can do scales just as well as any clarinet, violin, oboe, trumpet or French horn. In some cases the human can do better. In some cases the ability of the voice is so good that the singer can do those scales as well as the musician after just a few lessons. After months of practice room time, the violinist might be a little miffed to hear a new soprano at his school imitating his C major scales in the adjacent practice room. This would be enough to upset his ego, but that poor musician may have his instructor tell him the advice Quantz has for the flutist. Listen to that new soprano and try to follow the shading of emotion she displays with her voice as she sings her songs. In as much as she can make her voice follow the C major scale making a credible impersonation of the violinist next door, she can also change the color of her voice in almost any way she wants. The violinist does have some color latitude with his instrumental sound, but comparing the coloring abilities of the violin to the human voice is like comparing a switch blade
to the best Swiss army knife. 
When he admits he is overmatched, the musician is left to carp about the imprecision of the soprano’s intonation, lack of rhythm, missed entrances, overlong phrase conclusions all of which add up to that most general ancient/modern complaint; singers are just not musicians.
So what am I trying to say? In short…. I have been long winded today, haven’t I?… Sing scales like you know how they should be sung from listening to your friends from the orchestra play their scales. The violin sounds like the violin from the open G string to the highest note the player can make without leaving the finger board on the E string. The player needs to work hard to make a sound his parents will tolerate. You need to sound like you from the lowest note you can sing to the highest, letting everyone hear that you know just as much about singing scales as the best violin player, and always retain the individual, identifiable sound that God gave you.
The correct song for you is: “ Anything you can do I can do better”. Think of Betty Hutton as the singer and Howard Keel as the violinist.