SINGING AS AX AKT 681 



through the awkwardness of the singer. The term "placing the 

 voice " is so commonly used that I do not hesitate to employ it here. 

 But when the voice is rightly produced the placing muscles do not 

 interfere with the muscles above them which move the tongue, and 

 so pronunciation and tone are new unimpeded, for they act inde- 

 pendently. By whispering a sentence, and then suddenly singing it, 

 we can observe the placing muscles come into play, and how they 

 are quite different from those we employed in whispering only. 



Thus we see that the difficulty lies not in the pronunciation itself, 

 but in singing in such a manner that unconscious pronunciation is a 

 result. In bad singing the jaw is always fixed; indeed a triple 

 combination for evil is coincident in the fixedness of the tongue, throat 

 and jaw. When one is rigid all are rigid, and this could be easily 

 explained scientifically. 



The old masters of singing, without any knowledge of anatomy, held 

 it to be of the greatest importance that during the singing of scale 

 passages the jaw was not to move. Their maxim was " He who moves 

 the mouth cannot sing." Pachiorotti held that "He who knows how 

 to breathe and how to pronounce " knows how to sing. Crescentini 

 averred that " Looseness about the neck and the voice on the breath " 

 is the art of singing. If we do not produce the voice rightly, either 

 the throat contracts in a manner which we recognize as throaty, or 

 the nasal cavities are rigidly held and we say the sound is nasal; or we 

 hear a hooting, lugubrious sound, terribly monotonous and sepul- 

 chral; or silly sounds are produced which have been called in Italian 

 vocc bianc, voix blanche by the French, or white, blatant, colorless voice, 

 like that produced by the half-witted. 



Awkward rigidity about the floor of the mouth is also fatal to 

 the freedom of the muscles which tune the larynx. So when a note 

 starts exactly on the pitch intended, it is the most important sign of 

 perfect voice-production. Many of us at times have sung a note which 

 seemed to roll out in unconscious freedom and with great sonority. 

 The art of singing is to find out how this excellence may be attained 

 in all the notes of the voice. 



There are placing muscles and tuning muscles. When length, 

 breadth and thickness of the vocal chords are rightly adjusted, the 

 intrinsic muscles of the larynx can tune the different notes in un- 

 conscious ease. Moreover such notes respond to the right breath con- 

 trol. 



We learn from the old Masters that they arrived at placing the 

 voice, poising the larynx on the breath, by the very simple method of 

 endeavoring to sing a note while they measured the breath by breath- 

 ing on a mirror or against a lighted taper held opposite the mouth. 

 They could thus judge whether the note sounded fully without dis- 

 turbing the breath. Supposing the note was not placed, the singer 



