Why Garcia?
In the preface of the first edition of Garcia’s
École de Garcia : traité complet de l’art du chant en deux parties Garcia introduces himself.
The son of an artist generally appreciated as a singer, and who is recommended as a master by the merited reputations of several of his students. I have collected his instructions, fruits of a long experience and of a most cultivated musical taste.
It is his method which I have wanted to reproduce by trying to reduce it to a more theoretical form and by attaching the results to the causes.
translation: Donald Paschke Da Capo Press
He says a lot in very few words. I remember thinking “How clumsy can old style language get?” Now, tenors really need to take special care about thinking anything. It took a while, but I realized that my problem was me. There are gems hidden in these preparations for getting down to business.
The understatement of his father’s reputation is so nice to read in this age of hype. It leads me to my indebtedness to James Radomski for his hard work and good writing in Manuel García (1775-1832) Chronicle of the Life of a bel canto Tenor at the Dawn of Romanticism. I already knew that “Daddy Garcia” was really something else before I ever heard his name. When Renata Booth handed me Rossini’s “Barbeire”, I took it home and played a little of it on the clarinet Peru Central School let me use to play in the Band. I reported to Renata: “I can’t sing that, with all those notes the page might as well be all black.” I could not follow the vocal line and assumed that the singer who could follow it had to be a minor god. This is how I was introduced to the music written for Manuel that still stands as an indelible witness to Garcia Senior’s formidable abilities. Dr. Radomski has done me a great service and also for the world of singing by giving us a picture of the person that was Manuel Garcia Sr. The man was not perfect, the singer not universal. His legacy, however, is magnificent and Dr. Radomski’s work puts “Daddy Garcia’s” historical significance into much better focus .
Garcia wanted us to know that his method is not his own invention. Garcia Jr. marked his dad as the real starting point for his observations. Some could say that invoking the authority of another can be a great technique for shielding oneself against criticism. Criticism of Garcia and his “Method” was and still is easy to find, but I believe his attribution of responsibility to his father for the method he published is a humble admission that his dad was primary and the son was secondary.
Moving through life in the big shadow of his dad was, no doubt, difficult in many ways for Manuel Jr.. He could be forgiven for riding youthful rebellion to denunciation of his father. Happily he was faithful to “family values” and carried his father’s efforts forward in such a manner that even today we are arguing about all the same things that surrounded the Garcia “Method” from its first publication. That argument is now much muted by PC concerns and University policy.
The effect of this “party line” consensus does have results. I received a note from a new friend on Face Book that I quote in part:
“Modern singing has developed an idea of what technique is that results in monotone singers: where coloration is tacked-on or added rather than resulting from the freeness of the voice.” Ronald Carter
I think it’s about time to push back on the tide of muted consensus that gives us such notable results.
“The human voice submits to the influence of age, sex, constitution, and undergoes innumerable modifications. Independent of the outstanding differences which distinguish the voices of various individuals, there are also an unlimited number of nuances belonging to the organ of a single individual. In fact, each voice can conform to the inflections of the most varied passions; it can imitate the cries of animals and nearly all the sounds which our ears can perceive.”
(translation: Donald Paschke – Da Capo Press)
“In our considerations, we will not concern ourselves with the different timbres which characterize and differentiate the voices of individuals, but only with the diverse timbres which the voice of the same individual presents.”
(translation: Donald Paschke – Da Capo Press)
Let’s get the words worked out. TIMBRE is really the best word to use in the technical sense, but I really like common language better…. Well, you know where I come from. Let’s just say that TIMBRE equals color. Now I feel better.
What Garcia does with these quotes is to divide the generic category, VOCAL COLORS, into two subsets.
The first subset is the specific color mix belonging to the vocal gift I told everyone about in Merry Christmas 2011. Each voice has its own color mix which distinguishes it from all other voices. If the color mix is beautiful it is a great treasure, indeed. This subset of colors I think of as being as unique as a finger print.
The second subset is the vocal colors artists should use for interpretation. Each singer has at his or her disposal, according to Garcia, an unlimited range of colors with which to interpret. Garcia chose to discuss these colors. This is also the stuff by which artists like Mel Blanc and Bobby McFerren make a living.
I find it meaningful that Garica won’t discuss the identifying characteristics of individual voices. He didn’t need to make a case for what everyone understood. Different voices sound different. And they’re supposed to. Duh!
Which brings me back to Mr. Carter. His lament is understandable. You only need to read just a little of the stuff that comes off the presses of University Publishers to find hints on why he is dissatisfied. One can find books that talk about a new “Tonal Ideal” celebrated as the new “International Standard” of singing. Interesting though they may be, I consider these books to be a real threat to the voice student, because their goal is to unify, homogenize, standardize and ultimately to monotonize voices.
Mr. Carter’s comments are encouraging to me in that he has noticed the same vocal results that I’ve noticed over the span of my career. Today singers are arriving on the stage sounding more and more similar and less and less different.
That’s why: Garcia!
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Who is the guy in the photo? This is Randy Mickelson who gave me my first singing job in New York City. He also introduced me to Garcia and his writings. When we talked about Garcia, Randy mentioned that he was working on his own translation of the Complete Treatise with which he hoped to surpass the only translation then available. His enthusiasm inspired me to read the books, and, being a tenor, I went the quick route and started looking for that available translation.
Tenors are slow, but at least I found and purchased that translation. Now it is a joy to open my copy of Donald Paschke’s collation and translation of Garcia’s work that was published in French so, so long ago. The price was certainly right when I bought the two volumes of A COMPLETE TREATISE ON THE ART OF SINGING at Patelson Music for just over thirty dollars each. Nice to see that even the open market has set a high value on Garcia’s words. Maybe if I had payed the Joseph Patelson Music House the price these two volumes would cost me today on Amazon, Imight still be able to find that store across the street from the Carnegie Hall stage door.
I say the value of Garcia’s books is beyond price. They are the effort of an expert voice teacher to pass on practical knowledge to a world full of expert self promoters. He did a wonderful job in his book and Paschke did me and everyone else a great service by collating two editions. Paschke tells us he intended to reveal the evolution of Garcia’s thinking concerning vocal pedagogy, and I thank him for that effort. But I have an even greater debt to Paschke for making the comparison between the two editions.
I have to admit that it took me many years to come to any understanding of the stuff Garcia seemed intent on revealing. The reality that he was describing seemed distant and confusing to me. When I began to question the operation of my vocal instrument i.e.. “How did I do that?” I was at a loss to explain my abilities to anyone. Tenor that I am I was not very interested in giving away any secrets, but the mechanic in me was very curious about what those secrets might be. At that point of self inspection Garcia began to make sense to me. What I began to discover was that he (Garcia) was describing everything I had learned from my voice teacher, Renata Carisio Booth.
She’s the red head in the photo. I just didn’t know she had taught me a lot of his stuff. Her style of teaching did not include explanation of any of the principles upon which the whole singing thing is based. To her I was a tenor in the rough. Lets say a voice with no accessories. She told me one day that her work was done, and I was on my own to figure out what I had learned. Many years later she reminisced about teaching me and essentially said that I did what she asked. She challenged me and I refused to give up until I met the challenge. I never asked “Why?”, and she never had to tell me a single “Because…..”.
As I dug into Paschke’s translation of Garcia an intellectual understanding began to form in my “Tenor Mind” and it soon dawned on me something that I would have surely missed but for the collation Paschke did of the two editions. Garcia’s 1872 edition was a lot shorter than the 1841 edition. The stuff cut from the later edition did not, at first, seem super important, but even so I thought it strange that Garcia would make these abridgments. Because, in part, a lot of the missing material became really helpful to me, I began to believe that the deletions were made under pressure motivated by Editorial parsimony to which Garcia reluctantly acceded.
I am super convinced that Garcia’s understanding and explanative capabilities increased over his life time. This would not be unique to him. I think it’s normal for anyone in the professions to increase in wisdom as experience accumulates, tenors being the normal exception. Garcia was a baritone by the way. I believe the word count should have increased with each new edition. That the opposite seems to be true is sufficient evidence for this tenor to understand that printing costs money. Tenors don’t want to give away secrets, and publishers can be forgiven for feeling the same about paper.
Now we get to the real “So what?”. So….. I am convinced that Garcia wrote his first edition under the same Editorial Parsimony that I believe resulted in the Condensed Version that followed his original publication. Again “So what?”. The best idea this tenor ever had “Is what!”….. Of course there are other ideas that are closer to #1 on the “Top Ten list of Best Ideas I Ever Had”. I just can’t resist an opportunity for hyperbole. A good example of an even better idea is me asking my wife to marry me. That statement is not hyperbole. Now back to Garcia. I thought I should read Garcia as if it were some sort of Short Hand. That started me really digging in, and now I think I can offer some thoughts on the message that Garcia was trying to compress into way too few pages.
Thank you Donald V. Paschke wherever you are.
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