The Technique and The Method
Recently Debbie and I watched a Public Broadcasting remembrance of a fascinating Frenchman who made the USA his home and adopted nationality. The AMERICAN MASTERS program “Jacques Pépin: The Art of Craft” structured the story of his yet to be completed life into a beautiful biography. The truth of the “Old School” manner by which this unquenchably curios and ever ambitious achiever assailed life shined through in a manner that inspired Debbie to insist I make a blog about it.
This man’s significance to the world of food is already well established and I hope he will keep feeding posterity from his larder of knowledge and cornucopia of inspiration. I’m interested in him because I believe his life to be a great rerun, in the food world, of Manuel Garcia’s life in the opera world. He hasn’t attained to Manuel’s longevity, but he has certainly matched Manuel in the realm of universal respect in his industry.
There is no doubt about his convictions concerning the technical foundation for his “Art”, and so refreshing to read his humble words of estimation of his “Art Form” in the interview, “Blue Collar, White Hat”, in The Columbia Journal of American Studies. One of the parallels I see to Garcia’s time line; Pépin might never have written his books “La Technique” or “La Methode” without a disaster forcing a hard turn for his ascending star as it traveled through time with us. Pépin almost died in an auto accident. It forced him from behind the stove at his restaurant onto a path of advocacy for his “Art Form”. I would say the world of food is richer for this turn of events, even if Pépin had to suffer. He serves society in a much larger way now than would have been possible to him as a chef in even the most celebrated restaurant on earth.
Disaster struck the Garcia family when Manuel Sr. was robbed by bandits in Mexico. They took the fortune he had amassed in the New World from him before he could get it back home. 
What little money the bandits missed in their search of the Garcia entourage was about enough to pay for their passage back to Europe. The great tenor had to start from scratch to build a new nest egg. When the old man got back to Paris, he had little time to wait before his son recounted his disastrous debut in Naples, and announce his desire to begin building a life outside of music. In the fullness of time the elder Manuel’s voice began showing signs of age and the singer, still short of the nest egg lost, had to turn to teaching to make a livelihood and about this time the younger Manuel set his sights on supporting himself while traveling the world. His mother talked him out of it, and I thank God she did. Papa Garcia had already founded a school of singing in Paris and Garcia Jr. signed on to help his dad. Disasters; dad’s forced contribution to Mexico’s benefits for bandits program, young Manuel’s failure to launch as an Opera Star and papa’s voice surrendering to the pressures of Father Time, set the stage for Garcia’s stellar teaching career and his two wonderful books. Garcia’s “Ecole de García” part one and part two could have been called exactly the same titles Pépin used for his two books. Maybe Pépin had a better editor.
Garcia lived 101 years. I pray that Pépin, if he so desires to endure, may exceed Garcia’s record. Given the content of the interview to which I link above, I’m inspired to pray that he keeps talking, teaching and writing. Old School is really hard to find.
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Advice for the Young
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………………….
HEY YOU!!!! LEAVE THAT BARGE ALONE. IT’S MINE.
Read MoreFalsetto Friends
I am about to pack my bags and go back to Torino for a Master Class that will bring me back where another Falsetto kerfuffle in my life was born.
Last September I had the privilege to work with some really talented young people who offered me many opportunities to use Garcia. It was a tenor, of course, who started the ball rolling toward an incident in Rovereto. I taught that tenor how to sing “Una furtiva lagrima” from L’ELESIR’ D’AMORE. It wasn’t the only aria we worked on, but it became a bone of contention. I mentioned this tenor’s success in the little concert we did in Torino in a previous blog from that city. It was a struggle to convince him, but eventually he successfully put Falsetto to exactly the use for which the Bel Canto composer, Donizetti, intended. The result was most gratifying, but a kerfuffle was set to catch up to me a month later.
Now, my struggle with my Torino tenor was nothing new to my work. I strove for an extended period, back in Plattsburgh, to convince another tenor to utilize Falsetto in Bel Canto music with eventual and welcome success. Apparently Verdi loving voice teachers are loath to accept Falsetto as a worthy component of good singing, and I encountered in these tenors a shared attitude of aversion for Falsetto use. My Plattsburgh tenor told me that his previous Maestri had told him that what I was suggesting to him was “not singing”.
Even with this background, I was not ready for the incredulous inquiry I received after the Rovereto concert. A Rovereto home boy baritone participated in the concert, and during the crowded aftermath he got in my face (it was very noisy in the hallway) and asked me if I had, by chance, ever worked with a certain tenor. It was my Torino guy. I told the home boy that I had worked with him in more than one master class, upon which declaration the baritone told me that he had recently been on the jury of a competition in which that tenor had sung “Una furtiva lagrima”. He did not win the competition because of the way he sang that aria. The baritone wanted to know if it were true that I had taught him to sing so badly. Given that I was not there to hear what that tenor had done, I was at a loss to discuss the quality of his rendition of “Una furtive lagrima” but I did manage to bellow that I had taught him how to sing the aria “alla” Bel Canto. I was happy that at that point in our semi-shouted conversation a bevy of fans grabbed him away from me and I was accosted by a few audience members that wanted to recount to me good memories of performances in which I sang. I felt badly for my Torino tenor.
The baritone’s dislike for good Bel Canto style was easily understandable given his performance of Mozart’s music in the concert. Everyone, including me, would praise the quality of the man’s voice, but I wouldn’t suggest his rendition as a model for anyone to follow in the interpretation area. This is because I believe Mozart’s music lives best in a style of singing that this Rovereto home boy just didn’t bring to the concert. I suspected that many of my favorite components of Mozart style are missing from the man’s vocal technique.
I subsequently learned from my Torino tenor that he was a “good friend” of this Rovereto home boy and that they had shared a voice teacher. A light bulb switched on in my head! It has long been my observation that teachers often teach the style of singing they employed, when and if they sang for a living, as if it were a technique. I have often heard and read references to Verdi technique, Rossini technique, Bellini technique etc. essentially mixing style and technique together. These Torino / Rovereto events brought home to me most forcefully how limiting this way of thinking and teaching can actually be. Vocal technique is not style specific, but empowering to all styles. Style and technique are not the same thing. Each style, excepting the hardest Bel Canto, has a limited set of technical requirements, and teaching only those requirements leaves the student bereft of many elements of technique necessary for the other styles.
I knew that the technical components I had taught my Plattsburgh and Torino tenors to use for “Una furtiva lagrima” would inspire an audience to applaud. My audiences did when I used them. Since I learned these technical things from a woman born just 5 years after Garcia’s death and I learned how to apply them to “Una furtiva lagrima” from a man of her generation who attended her alma mater at the same time she did, I assume my taste and style of execution for the singing of this aria are traditional. Looking back at the history of music through the lens each composer offers us on the time line can be a wonderfully enlightening study, but if one of them, like Verdi, becomes a glass so darkened that his becomes the only style visible to a teacher or singer, then just about all other composers’ music will suffer damage at the hands of the teacher and the voice of the singer. It was nice to hear from my Torino tenor about his audience at the competition that he didn’t win. He told me that they enthusiastically approved of his rendition, even if his “good friend” Rovereto home boy, and the teacher they once upon a time shared, who was also on that jury, didn’t like it.
Falsetto has a place in the House of Music, even for boys. There is a lot of confusion about when it is called for, what it should sound like and when it is inappropriate. I hope to get to these issues very soon.
The artist in the above video is my reason for never singing Nemorino. I knew I couldn’t compete with Luciano. My Torino tenor is no match for Luicano either, but he learned to do everything Luciano did in the above video and more. I’ll be back to explain the “more”.
Read MoreRoad Rant
Recently, I was a happy guest at the Sheraton Malpensa airport. I had an early enough flight to catch to make overnighting there a comfortable alternative to getting up in the wee hours in Torino for the two hour trip to Malpensa. Oh! How I love to travel.
I decided to try the restaurant, and found a wonderful acoustic space. Restaurants are usually really good for intimate conversation which means something like the environment talkative children tend to create when the “Shut up and go to bed!!!” order arrives from parent central. With a blanket and a flashlight an intimate conversatoin acoustic is found and parent central may never know. The space in which Il Canneto Restaurant serves breakfast, lunch and dinner is a marvel of friendly warmth…… But not the blanket type.
My fun began when I noticed an entertaining mistake in the wine list which I pointed out to my server. A little while later, during my meal, a young man came to my table to thank me for the proof reading work I had done for him. We struck up a conversation, and with young singers still fresh in my mind, I asked if he had ever thought to have live singing in the restaurant. The answer was no, but he was willing to bring the idea to the attention of the administration. His superior joined our conversation and admitted to being a La Scala subscriber in her student days, but had to give it up when she lost her ability to acquire a student discounted subscription. She also expressed interest in the idea of live singing in her restaurant. They wondered how they would be able to know who was good and who was not. I left my card with them and asked them to please let me help if classical singing was something they decided to fit into their marketing plans. An audience for a young singer is essential. Who cares where you find it?
My favorite futurist sent me more relevant quotable stuff just in time for this blog. While Greg Sandow talked about his “Speaking about Music” communications course he is teaching at Julliard School, he let a big cat out of the bag. The first sentence I quote makes reference to a “that”, and here is the full meaning of his “that” in just two words: “self-promotion”. He contracts twenty five words in his blog with “that”:
Now students know they’ll have to do a lot of that on their own, and that they’ll have to do it in new, lively, communicative ways. Of course this is tied to the new stress on entrepreneurship in conservatories, Juilliard included. Classical musicians in the future will be much better off if they can create careers on their own, and being able to engage people about what they do is a central part of that.
Future Past
This is really rich. Mr. Sandow is looking into a future that seems distant but familiar. He sees a future in which highly educated, heavily indebted graduates of his university will be better served by finding work outside the traditional classical music outlets. Does he believe that the future will look like the middle ages when guys with guitars or lutes would sing for change in market cities? Of course those future troubadours will need to take his “Speaking about Music” classes to learn how to use their hand-helds and smartphones to market themselves on Face Book and Twitter. Does he consider that the income level of such pursuits would never be able to pay off the debt to which an un-rich student needs to enslave himself or herself in order to pay Julliard tuition? Maybe Julliard is just looking for a way to stay relevant. In the retail business, I’ve heard it said that when demand is down Advertise, Advertise, Advertise. I guess someone at Julliard overheard one of those conversations. Business is business, but I thought Julliard was a music school. Anyway, Mr. Sandow sounds bearish on the music business when he blogs.
Who needs the stuffy theater?
My eyes are always open for opportunities allowing youngsters to cut their teeth in nontraditional venues. I hope future Julliard grads won’t need them to support themselves. Let’s get real. Sandow gets it right in one of his later blogs that I already talked about. Grow the audience in those traditional classical music outlets, and professional level performers will meet healthy demand for their services from those healthy institutions of Classical Music. It’s frustrating that Sandow doesn’t tell us how he thinks this rosy future can be won. What he does tell us is that he and Julliard want their grads to look to non-traditional venues in which to make a living.
Where you find it..
Sandow would seem to be anticipating an imminent collapse of demand for their graduates. This would create a supply of talent in the music world that main line presenters could not save from starvation. I guess I would be wrong to even encourage young people to strive for a career in Opera if my outlook were so skeptical. I think Sandow and Julliard are worse than wrong. If they really believe in their “new stress”, they are stealing money from students, even from those who have to borrow it.
Sandow does say that the keystone or maybe the corner stone for music’s fabulous future is to: “Create performances so powerful — and so much in tune with current culture — that people just about break down our doors to go to them.” Now that statement is so packed with stuff that I would have to destroy my 1000 word limit to comment.
I will keep reading Mr. Sandow’s blogs, but I wonder if we will ever receive even the smallest snippets of his magic formula that forms the basis of his consultancy to classical music.
Read MoreWhite Christmas
Our Christmas tree is up in our living room again. We exchanged gifts, and we celebrated. I pray everyone has found reasons to celebrate this Christmas season, especially if the Birth of Christ isn’t one of them. His birth has no equal among my list of reasons to celebrate this Christmas and, come to think of it, this is true of every other Christmas I have enjoyed since I signed up to follow Him. Among this long list of other things to celebrate that enlivened our 2013 celebration of Christ’s Birthday is the marking of two years of existence for this blog. I am so happy to have the struggle of putting this little pile of pages together.
Ice Bronzed back yard at dawn.
I believe the reason I have come this far is the Birthday Baby our Christmas celebrations are all about. He has shown me value in things that, without His guidance, would have had little value to me. His promises He keeps and I rely on them. I believe that if you are reading these pages, and find something useful or even just some entertaining things on them, your discoveries validate a small part of my enlistment with Christ. For His part, and it is a very small sliver of what He has promised, every moment of being at a loss to know what to do for a student or lacking something to type into my little computer for this blog, He comes to my rescue. He always comes to my rescue.
The words I keep adding to these “RockwellBlake.com” pages I think of as little blessings. My blessings, that is. You reading this blog I also count among my blessings. Thanks for coming. If you keep reading, then I have my confirmation that these pages are worth writing.
Celebrations are usually full of interesting tidbits of entertainment. This year we have the best twisted weather.
Global Warming!
No doubt about it. It’s a first for me. The snow that came down all pretty and powdery just a little while ago is now “bronzed” in ice on our roof and in our back yard. Oh yes, we cannot forget the trees. They were not left out of the coating program. For me it is another reminder of just how interesting creation is. When Christ was born, shoes were not for babies and too simple to deserve electroplating . Besides, electroplating didn’t get invented until the 19th Century and didn’t get used on shoes until the 20th Century, but what we have on our roof, backyard and trees sure makes me think that Christ’s Father can remind us in many ways of His Pride and Joy. After all, insurance companies are always talking about the Power of Christ’s Father with the words: “Acts of God”. Why not fulfill my dreams of a “White Christmas” by freezing one into an H2O “bronzed” snow sculpture?
Better than Bronze
If our temperatures stay low enough, the ice will keep, our Christmas season will be white for quite a while, and we could slide across the ice directly into the New Year.
Part of our traditional way to celebrate is to view some of our favorite movies that use Christmas as their central theme. “Holiday Inn” always inspired me to reach for the Kleenex in previous viewings, but, this time I found myself focusing on the singing so much that I was distracted from the emotional flow of the play. Bing Crosby and all his friends have lessons to teach, and I studied so hard that I did everything but take notes….. Tenors don’t take notes.
The Little Ausable River
On the other hand, “White Christmas” came through for me. There is nothing like sniffles and nose blowing to confirm that such a work of art has had the intended effect. Debbie and I, each Christmas time, dust off these old classics as a reminder of what once was seen as really valuable, even by Hollywood. We still have “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street” to visit again this year. I have my big box of Kleenex at the ready.
Up Close Ice at Dawn
Please accept my gratitude for coming to read what I have to say. Two years ago, I didn’t expect anyone to be interested. Wonders really never cease. My prayers are with you that you have blessings to celebrate this “Holiday Season”. Come back, please, and often so that your visits will add to the great number of blessings I have available to help with any attack of insomnia that I may suffer in the New Year coming. I pray that we all sleep well, when we want to, in 2014, and that we all find ourselves enjoying ever more blessings. Bing Crosby will remind me to count them next Christmas.
How to walk on water.
Trick and Treat Part 2
Shiver time is upon us. Temperatures are down to ice forming levels, local candidates are telling us what they want to do to us…… pardon me… for us, if they are elected on November 5th and Halloween is already in our rearview mirror. Scary things are still everywhere to be found if one just looks for them. It makes sense to me that people should shiver at what some of our local politicos say, given the arriving cold temperatures outside. It seems to me that many of them would not mourn to see some of us, as a result of taxation, shiver in our
Town Board of Plattsburgh New York
own homes… that is if we can even afford to keep our little huts. I hope a few of my fellow North Country Citizens will find the signs of these times shivery and get out to vote on 5 November… That’s tomorrow isn’t it? Being out in the cold is a long tradition in Clinton County, and tax auctions are especially shiver inspiring.
My favorite hut – I wear fur so I don’t shiver.
Shivering isn’t fun, but at least it’s not somnolence inspiring. After publication of my previous blog on the trick of talk, I received a note from a reader. In part he wrote:
In those brief minutes of run-throughs of Operas traditionally granted in German/Austria etc. houses, I would often ask a younger singer to not sing but try to recite the text and then sing it as you said. Unfortunately 90% of them were unresponsive and as a result they sang the “telephone book”. But those few exceptions who tried it went from student to artist in a heartbeat.
Rico Saccani via Email
Now, if you think of it, there is no way to imagine the recitation of names and numbers to be much more interesting or entertaining than traffic noise. Take it from me, even traffic noise can promote sleep. At least that was my experience when I spent long periods on Manhattan Island singing at Lincoln Center. Going to bed over Broadway was a special challenge at first, and then little by little the taxis, busses and trash trucks were just as good as the crickets of home for lulling me to sleep. A bedtime story read from the top of the “L” listings in the New York City White Pages would certainly have had the same effect.
Stark wrote some supporting words for my trick:
Despite the disagreements in the pedagogical literature, we cannot ignore the common theme that runs through so many works – namely, that there is something special, perhaps even ‘secret,’ involved in singing according to bel canto principles.
Stark, James (2003-03-28). Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Kindle Locations 346-348). University of Toronto Press. Kindle Edition.
Vocal author Edgar Herbert-Caesari maintained that the foundation of the old Italian school, from Caccini onward, is the ‘completely natural voice … that, without training, is able to articulate, enunciate, and sustain with perfect ease and freedom all vowels on all pitches in its particular compass’ (Herbert-Caesari 1936, 4). These views are unrealistic. Why one may ask, if the techniques of bel canto are so simple and direct, has great singing always been the art of the few and not of the many? Or, if Herbert-Caesari thought bel canto was just natural, untrained singing, why did he bother to write a book about vocal technique?
Stark, James (2003-03-28). Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Kindle Locations 361-369). University of Toronto Press. Kindle Edition.
James Stark tells us there is a bel canto “secret” running around in vocal literature. He further tells us that Edgar Herbert-Caesari did not capture or cage that runner in his theories. It is an interesting tactic that Stark employs to set up Herbert-Caesari as a crazy believer in “Natural Talent”. After all, why do we need voice teachers at all if the theories that Stark says Herbert-Caesari wrote down are true? (I know how to use the open question argument technique, even if I don’t like it much.) Voice Builders of the World should unite under the banner: “Hebert-Caesari – HERATIC” and advocate the burning of his books. That would be honest.
It is a joke, isn’t it?
Garcia had his say just a few years before the trio of Blake, Stark and Herbert-Caesari was born.
The true accent which is communicated to the voice when one speaks without preparation, is the base on which the singing expression is patterned. The chiaroscuro, the accents, the feeling all then take an eloquent and persuasive aspect. The imitation of the natural and instinctive movements should then be, for the student, the object of a very special study; but there is another means which will not serve less to initiate him into the secret of the emotions, and which we recommend to his zeal; here is this means; to isolate himself completely from the character which he is supposed to represent, to place himself face to face with that character in his imagination, and let him then act and sing. By reproducing faithfully the impressions which will have been suggested to him by that creation of fantasy, the artist will obtain much more striking effects than he would attain by beginning work straightway.
A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing Part 2 PAGE 140
As a footnote to the above text:
This advice is precisely that which Talma gave to a young man. This beginner was wearing himself out with vain efforts of declamation in the study of the role of Oreste; “You are deafening yourself: it is impossible for you to know what you are doing, because you do not know yet what you want to do; you have not determined in advance what effect you want to produce. Declaim your role without pronouncing a word.
Place your character before you, and then listen to him: judge his manner of acting and his delivery; finally, when you are satisfied with the performer [t’artiste] which your imagination portrays for you, it is then that you can imitate him and declaim aloud.” This precept of the most capable French tragic actor applies to every point in the art of singing. When the singer has learned an aria, if he wishes to render it with as much expression as he can impart to it and to embellish it with all the ornaments which the melody and the nature of the piece permit, he must concern himself with the conception before thinking of the performance. He must sing mentally, as it were, while his imagination places before him the character he will portray. When he has thus strongly conceived the dramatic situation, when he is well penetrated by the emotion traced by the composer, in short, when he has created for himself an ideal which is as perfect as possible, it is only then that he will put to work all his imitative faculties, that he will display all his means of expression and execution, in order to approach the pattern which his thought has offered to him as a model.
A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing Part 2 PAGE 140, 141 FOOTNOTE
As you can see in Garcia’s text, my trick is not new. The principle underpinning it is one of the “running secrets” Stark would like to capture. Herbert-Caesari may have inflated it into his own “Theory of Singing”, but Stark gives us no theory at all. It’s Garcia who gives us something to work with. See “Expression“
I simplify the Garcia advice down to the bare essentials. How you say what you say can live happily inside how you sing what you sing, and without a lot of magic mystery. The tools you use to make the spoken phonation and the sung phonation are the same tools in both cases. There is no magic here. What you hear you can mimic, and that includes mimicking yourself. These things rest on natural abilities, but they do not replace vocal technique. They can, however, confuse the ignorant….
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