{"id":3090,"date":"2014-01-26T21:31:07","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T01:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rockwellblake.com\/blog\/?p=3090"},"modified":"2014-11-27T18:33:44","modified_gmt":"2014-11-27T22:33:44","slug":"lesson-one-001","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/26\/lesson-one-001\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesson One.001"},"content":{"rendered":"

My mind\u2019s eye view of Garcia\u2019s lessons, which\u00a0I mentioned in “Lesson One<\/a>“, started out with visions of this great maestro telling new students about the famous exploits of his father, the glory of the singing of his sisters, the fun he must have had, surrounded by his family in the first Season of Italian Opera ever presented in New York City where he made his Operatic Debut as Figaro in the Barber of Seville, the trial by fire of his debut in Naples where he was unable to prove himself a professional of star quality, and the new, if short lived, freedom from music he discovered when he was able to present his bad reviews of that debut to his daddy. Any ordinary maestro di canto would fit nicely into these images, but, the better I knew the story of Garcia and his father, the more I saw him as a serious professional unlikely to engage in such superficial banter. I now have an idea how he would have sought to guide his newest students toward perfecting the beauty that he recognized in the voices of each of them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In \u201cLesson One<\/a>\u201d I quote Garcia telling us that\u00a0teachers must deal with many \u201cfaults\u201d endemic to untrained voices, and one could be forgiven for misconstruing the negative spin Garcia gives to: \u201ctremulous, nasal, guttural, veiled, harsh, schrill <\/a>and the \u201clack of power, range, steadiness, elasticity, or mellowness.<\/em>\u201d It might seem obvious to some that Garcia was giving us a list of affects<\/a> that the trained voice must never display, and if one were to fail to read Garcia\u2019s second book, then those so convinced might never find a reason to doubt their conviction. It is in that second book that Garcia describes some of these \u201cfaults\u201d as interpretive tools. Yes, they diminish the beauty of the singer\u2019s voice, but they were essential to the interpretive artist of Garcia\u2019s day.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In that second book Garcia gives advice for interpretation that relies on the recitation of words separated from melody, and with this advice he makes a full circle return to using some of the very affects<\/a> he has told us we will discover in the untrained voice. First, he advises that these vocal \u201cfaults\u201d should be eliminated, but then, he wants the singer to reintroduce them as expressive tools after the singer is able to successfully avoid them. When strong emotion is not wanted then the singer should avoid those several faults which may have tainted the singer\u2019s voice at the start of training. But Garcia is most emphatic that the singer be free to put them back into the voice when needed on the stage. More than free to use them, the singer must use them when he wants to impart the correct emotional effects of various degrees of personal disaster or delight which one finds written into the greatest music and even some of the modest music a singer might be called upon to interpret.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So what does the above full circle have to do with Lesson One.001? It has to do with how I believe Garcia sought to \u201cdiscover and develop<\/span><\/a>, among all the qualities of tone which the student’s voice presents, that one which combines to the highest degree all the desirable conditions.<\/em>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

My daydreams of Garcia\u2019s first lessons are full of his advice intended to carve away the \u201cfaults\u201d presented by the student\u2019s voice, just like Michelangelo<\/a> carved away marble at \u201cfault\u201d for hiding his David<\/a> from his eyes. What did Garcia want to chip off the voice? His sketch of things to carve off is quoted above. But why do the listed \u201cfaults\u201d haunt and obscure the \u201cgerm<\/a>\u201d of beauty in the voices of the singers that Garcia allowed to enter his studio? Where do the faults on his list come from? Vocal faults are all traceable: some to speech patterns, some to pathologies and some to insufficiencies. Garcia was careful to tell us the qualifications necessary in a student, and if he followed his own advice, pathologies and insufficiencies would not have crossed his studio\u2019s threshold. The student\u2019s speech pattern is certainly another matter. The work of purifying the vocal sound, eliminating offensive accretions on even the first vowel \u201cA\u201d makes me think of \u201cMy Fair Lady<\/a>\u201d. The highly entertaining frustration of the elocution master<\/a> in this musical stands as one of the best examples of what a Student \u2013 Teacher relationship should not be. The process I believe Garcia used for instruction was collaborative, not Warlike. Unlike Professor Higgins of the musical, Garcia did not want to make those speech pattern \u201cfaults\u201d disappear forever, and so would seek to have the student voluntarily give them up, not avoid them from fear of reprisal.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Garcia Jr. tells us to listen to all the tone\/color qualities that the student\u2019s voice presents and guide the singer to promote those positive qualities the voice already presents<\/em><\/span> while guiding the singer away from those tone\/color qualities that are detrimental to the \u201cbeauty of the voice<\/em>\u201d. That \u201cbeauty<\/em>\u201d is what Garcia Sr. claims<\/a> to be the most powerful tool a singer has when, seeking to \u201ccommand<\/em>\u201d the attention of an audience. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Garcia Jr. never\u00a0gets closer to discussing the subject of personal color qualities than the quote in\u00a0“Lesson One<\/a>“. I wrote about the distance he maintained from\u00a0this discussion\u00a0in \u201cWhy Garcia<\/a>\u201d and \u201cFactory Made<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He does not<\/span> suggest the use of Clear Timbre <\/a>or Dark Timbre<\/a>, and neither does he say that Chest Voice<\/a>, Falsetto <\/a>or Head Voice <\/a>are relevant issues in this voyage of discovery. His advice is that the natural\/untrained voice displays all the \u201cqualities of tone<\/em>\u201d that we are to seek to promote. They are specific and endemic to each voice, present because of the structure of each individual instrument, and, in the case of these qualities being beautiful, they must be nurtured with the greatest of care. Not covered with Dark or Clear timbres.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This lesson is about treating the student with great care. We must understand that the beautiful voice is a rare item, and deserving of the time and effort to purify the striking qualities that it alone possesses. No teacher can create such a voice. Any teacher can destroy it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My mind\u2019s eye view of Garcia\u2019s lessons, which\u00a0I mentioned in “Lesson One“, started out with visions of this great maestro telling new students about the famous exploits of his father, the glory of the singing of his sisters, the fun he must have had, surrounded by his family in the first Season of Italian Opera […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3094,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4,53,51,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-featured","category-garcia","category-singing","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Lesson-One001c.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2kj1l-NQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3090"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3357,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090\/revisions\/3357"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}