I’m getting my work done. I have a mission and it looms over everything I do, but no one can “Tote that barge” until barges cease to be, or “lift that bail” until no bail shall be left to lift. It is a special work for me; editing this Garcia book. I started out reading Donald Paschke’s translation with a tenor attitude. You know,,,, I couldn’t really understand how it was important and if people were handing me contracts all the time, what good was that dead white guy going to do me anyway? Now I’m older and totally in love with Paschke’s brilliant idea. By sifting together two different editions of Garcia’s “Method” he allows the reader to discover for him/her-self some very subtle secrets that are becoming even more fascinating for me as I approach the end…. Not my end, I hope,,,, but the end of my first edit of the first book.
“Barge and Bail” Song
Paul Robeson had a great voice, didn’t he?
As important as I know it is to make Garcia’s writings available to young singers, I just had to drop the “Tote” rope and break away from my stack of editing “bails” to jump on an opportunity to be useful to two singers who asked for my advice. I hope helping them in plain view may also be helpful to you.
What fun it is to have a request coming from Sweden. Jenny Lind left Sweden looking for Garcia’s help, and in Paris he put her singing back on track. The results are historic. Well, another Swede, Petter Reingardt, is seeking my advice. I hope I can make Garcia as helpful to this tenor as the Grand Maestro was to that stellar soprano who started her life in Petter’s neighborhood.
The tipping point to distraction from my present “barge” and “bails” landed in my Email as a response to a letter I sent to everyone I recently heard in LA. I was there to audition singers for the Palm Springs Opera Guild Rossini Award. One of the respondents asked me to cover the same program about which the Swedish tenor was asking advice. I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a blog of my answer. Besides, pulling “barges” and handling “bails” are kind of heavy work for tenors anyway.
Some time ago I asked Petter if I could blog my answers to his questions, and he graciously accepted to be outed as a singer seeking help. My correspondent from the Palm Springs Opera Guild Rossini Award auditions may not want to be publicly exposed, and, since I didn’t ask, her name is changed to protect the innocent.
Petter Reingardt:
3. I feel that my voice is quite small but high and light. I’m searching for that dark timbre you have by breathing low, relaxing jaw and throat, and keeping the larynx in a lower position. Now I wonder: have you ever felt that your voice is not big enough? If you did; how did you solve this problem?
Jenny Lind (pseudonym):
My current teacher, Dr. *******, has been having me work to bring the low, settled larynx position into the higher notes, and not strain for them.
Mr. Reingardt could be doing his own thing, but my soprano friend has a teacher telling her to adopt the same project. They use different words and describe different motivations, but the project is the same, and it is totally upside down. According to Garcia, the larynx has no “settled’ level. Garcia asserted and demonstrated to The Academy of Science in France on April 12, 1841, that the larynx has two different mannerisms that are relevant to our discussion. They have nothing to do with attaining a particular size of voice or high note decoration. The larynx moves for many reasons that fall mostly within the category of Timbre application to the voice.
Picking out the position of the larynx as the key feature of the vocal instrument and focusing on maneuvering it to a lower than normal position as a general principle regulating “size” of voice or vocal “beauty” in singing is like deciding to concentrate on the position of the elbows as one takes on the hurdles. I think the modern vocal pedagogical statement can be phrased: If the larynx “settles”, or, better stated, is pulled into a lower position, the singing will improve.
Team USA 400 meter hurdle runner, Georganne Moline, practices on Wednesday, August 1, 2012.
It is no less folly for a Track and Field coach to suggest that if a runner manages to pull the elbows as far back as possible while running the hurdles, he/she will have lower times and fewer downed barriers.
Garcia demonstrated to the Academy the mobility of the larynx in his students while they sang in Clear Timbre and the “fixed” position of the larynx while they sang in Dark Timbre. Today we are faced with acceptance of a very wrong idea. It seems that many think the human voice to be capable of being anything its owner or the teacher in charge wants it to be, and the larynx is the principle tool for building the voice desired. It would seem that my friends are working from the hypothesis that the larynx is in some way an obstacle to attaining the results they or their teachers would like to hear. My soprano friend wants better high notes and Mr. Reingardt wants a bigger sound.
The descriptions that Garcia employs for explaining what happens to the various parts of the vocal apparatus are always post performance discussions. He is describing what can be observed while a person makes a vocal effect. That is to say, one must first attain the effect, and then one can discuss what happened as the individual made the vocal effect.
There are a lot of unrevealed assumptions that Garcia terms “Secrets” and in Philosophical circles the term “presuppositions” would be applicable. They lurk between many lines of Garcia’s writings. I find almost all of them related to a consensus existent during the many days of Garcia’s life. I am talking about a consensus that existed between Garcia, other vocal maestri, critics reporting on the musical doings in their region as well as the majority of the audience Garcia would join when he would attend performances. When Garcia would sit to hear great singers ply their trade on the stage, Garcia and his fellow audience members would enthusiastically applauded and bravo their work according to the satisfaction these singers would provide, and critics wrote of these events with a level of understanding I believe no longer exists. If the singer happened to be a student of Garcia, his pedagogical competition might have curbed their enthusiasm for partisan reasons, but even they would have agreed on one assumption. The great singer they heard had a great gift, and what that gift consisted of was recognized by just about everyone who would applaud. Consensus was there, and a singer of Jenny Lind’s caliber could attain the same level of fame in the Mechanical Age as Luciano Pavarotti did in our Age of Hyper Media.
So, what is my advice? Don’t lower your larynx to make your sound larger, and don’t expect the lowered larynx to make your high notes more beautiful. Laryngeal position management has nothing to do with attaining the best display of a singer’s gift. The larynx moves about as a participating component of the vocal instrument that attains an endless list of vocal effects. The beauty of one’s high notes and ultimate greatness of the individual gift is independent of such technical considerations. Garcia tells us teachers to seek out these gifts:
Often one needs an experienced judgment to recognize in the voice of the student the germ of the true qualities which it possesses.
And then he speaks of the first job of a teacher:
Generally, these qualities are only in the rudimentary state, or well veiled by numerous faults from which it is necessary to free them.
The essential point is to first establish the existence of them; one then manages to complete the development of them by patient and orderly studies.
Voices in their natural states are nearly always unpolished, unequal, unsteady, even tremulous, and, finally, heavy and of short range; only study, but a well-informed and persistent study, can make firm the intonation, purify the timbres, perfect the intensity and the elasticity of the tone. Through study, one can smooth the harsh-nesses, the disparities of the registers, and by uniting them to each other, one can extend the scope of the voice. Study will make us acquire agility, a quality generally too much neglected, especially in Italy. It is necessary to submit to rigorous exercise not only the stubborn organs, but also those which, drawn along by a dangerous facility, cannot control their movements. That apparent flexibility is connected to lack of clarity, steadiness, balance, and breadth; that-is-to-say, to the absence of all the elements of accent and style.
The above text is on page 3 of the book I am about to finish editing. I’ll be back to tell my friends how I think Garcia would advise them further if he were still with us.
While putting this blog together I’ve let a few too many “bails” pile up and that “barge” is drifting away………………….