Tenors are slow, but at least I found and purchased that translation.\u00a0 Now it is a joy to open my copy of Donald Paschke’s collation and translation of Garcia’s work that\u00a0was\u00a0published in French so, so long ago.\u00a0 The price was certainly right when I bought the two\u00a0volumes of A COMPLETE TREATISE ON THE ART OF SINGING<\/a>\u00a0 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\u00a0payed the\u00a0 Joseph Patelson Music House<\/a> the price these two volumes would cost me today on Amazon,\u00a0Imight still be\u00a0able to find\u00a0that store\u00a0across the street from the Carnegie Hall stage door.<\/strong><\/p>\n I say the value of\u00a0Garcia’s books\u00a0is\u00a0beyond 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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. <\/a>Tenor that I am I was not very interested\u00a0in giving away any secrets,\u00a0but the mechanic in me was\u00a0very curious about what those secrets\u00a0might 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. <\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u00a0not include explanation of\u00a0any of the principles upon which the whole\u00a0singing thing\u00a0is based. To her I was a tenor\u00a0in the rough.\u00a0Lets say a voice with no accessories.\u00a0 She\u00a0told me one day that her work was done, and I was on my own to figure out what I had learned.\u00a0 Many\u00a0years later she reminisced about teaching me and essentially said that I did what she asked.\u00a0 She\u00a0challenged me and I refused to give up until I met the challenge. \u00a0I never asked “Why?”, and she never had to tell me a single “Because…..”.<\/strong><\/p>\n As\u00a0I dug into Paschke’s translation of Garcia an\u00a0intellectual understanding began to\u00a0form in\u00a0my “Tenor Mind”\u00a0and it\u00a0soon dawned on me something\u00a0that I would have surely missed but for\u00a0the collation Paschke did of the two editions.\u00a0Garcia’s\u00a01872 edition was a lot shorter than the 1841 edition. The stuff cut from the later edition did not, at first,\u00a0seem super important, but even so I thought it strange\u00a0that\u00a0Garcia would\u00a0make these abridgments.\u00a0\u00a0Because, in\u00a0part,\u00a0a lot of the missing material\u00a0became\u00a0really helpful to me,\u00a0I began to believe that the deletions were made under pressure motivated by Editorial parsimony to which Garcia reluctantly acceded.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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!”…..\u00a0Of course there are other ideas that are\u00a0closer to #1\u00a0on the\u00a0“Top Ten list of Best Ideas I\u00a0Ever Had”.\u00a0 I just can’t resist an\u00a0opportunity for hyperbole.\u00a0 \u00a0A good example of\u00a0an even better\u00a0idea is me asking my wife to marry me.\u00a0 That statement is not hyperbole.\u00a0 Now back to Garcia.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0thought I should\u00a0read Garcia as if it were some sort of Short Hand. That started me really digging in, and now\u00a0I think I can offer some thoughts on the message that Garcia was trying to compress into way too few pages.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Thank you Donald V. Paschke wherever you are.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who is the guy in the photo?\u00a0 This is Randy Mickelson who gave me my first singing \u00a0job in New York City.\u00a0 He also introduced me to Garcia and his writings.\u00a0 When\u00a0we talked about\u00a0Garcia, Randy\u00a0mentioned that he was working on his own translation of the Complete Treatise with which he hoped to surpass […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1020,"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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,53,52,51,50],"tags":[62,67,309,66,64,65,63],"class_list":["post-957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-garcia","category-personal-history","category-singing","category-teaching","tag-da-capo-press","tag-donald-v-paschke","tag-garcia","tag-joseph-patelson-music-house","tag-randy-mickelson","tag-renata-booth","tag-voice"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/2008-08-08-New-Scans-from-Negatives-72-brighter-and-flipped.jpg?fit=2730%2C1638&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2kj1l-fr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957","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=957"}],"version-history":[{"count":58,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3838,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions\/3838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/2008-10-09-Scans-Sli-70-brighter.jpg?resize=300%2C199&ssl=1\" "\\"2008-10-09")
<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n